Abstract

This paper aims to conduct a careful reading of the text Black Skin, White Masks (1952) by the philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), which has been discussed within Pan-African studies and post-colonial theories. In this paper we will make a detailed analysis of the relations that the Martinican thinker had with another French thinker named Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who even wrote the preface to another text by Fanon entitled The Damned of the Earth (1961). Fanon was strongly influenced by Sartre's existentialist theory as disseminated in Europe in the 20th century, with the philosophical work Being and Nothingness: Essays on phenomenological ontology (1943) as a reference text. The meaning that we will give to this writing is not to be confused with a Sartrian reading of Fanon. On the contrary, we will try to expose Fanon's appropriation of the existentialist theory and, if possible, to point out the limits of the theory indicated by the Martinican thinker, especially when it comes to the studies of the "colored man". Therefore, it is under the horizon of a theory of human sciences that has the purpose of "disalienating the black man" that we will investigate the way Fanon uses and criticizes Sartre's theory throughout his work Black Skin, White Masks.

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