1. Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

Abstract

This chapter identifies Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a fault line between black diaspora studies and queer studies, and argues that it is a central work for theorizing the inextricability of blackness and sexuality in colonial modernity. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, an uneasy consensus had been reached in work by Diana Fuss, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, and Kobena Mercer that queer scholars could learn from Fanon’s work on blackness, but he was too homophobic for queer scholars to engage. So successful has this divide been that almost no contemporary scholarly work in black queer studies and black queer diaspora studies engages Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In turn, almost none of the important scholarship on Fanon takes sexuality as a foundational element of his thinking. My chapter argues that Fanon provides a genealogy of sexuality that has blackness as its foundation. The black person’s body is the psychic object of colonial modernity’s desire and the material through which such desire is expressed. Simply put, within the world created by colonial modernity—I use Sylvia Wynter’s 1492 as a handy starting point—desire and sexuality cannot be imagined without the black person’s body. In the latter part of the chapter, I move beyond this genealogical account and examine how Fanon’s attention to touch—“Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”—can be juxtaposed with Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to imagine and practice black livability. I read Fanon’s final injunction to “touch” the other as reclaiming frottage for black diasporic collectivity.