Black Skin, Red Masques: Reading Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde in Tension with Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

If we read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” as an allegory of the coronavirus crisis, how can we account for the resurgence of Black Lives Matter during this time? Scholars now agree that Poe held deeply racist beliefs about Black people: his Philadelphia was both a hub for scientific innovation and scientific racism coeval with being a site for a vibrant free Black community. I pair Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde to juxtapose with Poe in order to read the tensions between Poe’s racism versus Fanon’s anticolonial critique and Lorde’s Black feminism. Poe’s story offers us a tale of privileged indulgence as a selfish refuge during broader social crisis, which can be troubled by Fanon’s discussion of Black ontology and the “Prospero complex”. In contrast, Lorde’s Burst of Light presents an analysis for how self-care can be “an act of political warfare”, with her battles against cancer amidst her global activism for social justice focused on Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour. In my essay I use the dynamic anachronistic convergence of their writings as an occasion to consider questions of the racial politics of self and collective care in the face of crises of pandemic and police brutality that disproportionately impact Black people.