Abstract
This article re-examines Frantz Fanon's radicalization of psychoanalysis in Black Skin, White Masks, highlighting his conception of the cultural as the site of racial trauma. Taking up Jean Laplanche's notion of the ‘enigmatic message’ while recontextualizing it in a broader cultural field, Laura Christian elaborates a model of racialized ‘retrospectatorship’ from Fanon's accounts of his traumatic encounters with the cinema's racial phantasmatic. The concept of retrospectatorship in turn illuminates Issac Julien's short film. The Attendant (1993), which explores not only the traumatic but also the fantasmatic reverberations of the enigmatic message issued from the place of the white Other. Juxtaposed with Fanon's text, Julien' film also serves as intervention against the latter's homophobia and misogyny.
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