White Masks Research Articles

Fanon, temporality and pedagogy: Combatting racist (non-)relationalities of self and other

This article addresses relations between concepts of ‘self’, ‘other(s)’ and ‘othering’ through a reading of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s psychoaffective phenomenological and pedagogical narrative approach, reading his work as phenomenological and educational as well as critiquing phenomenology, psychology, educa invites renewed attention to the geopolitical tion and (of course) psychiatry. While most—especially educational—commentators base their engagement with Fanon’s revolutionary materialist phenomenology of racialised embodiment and consciousness on his first book, Black Skin White Masks and attend to his final book, Wretched of the Earth as expressing his core political and philosophical analyses, this article focuses in particular on Fanon’s second and middle book, A Dying Colonialism, evaluating the political possibilities of the specific narrative temporalities elaborated there. Notwithstanding its rather dismissive reception, it is argued that this, middle, book—written during, and as a document of, the Algerian liberation struggle—expresses and develops Fanon’s psychopolitical and performative philosophy of subjective and objective transformation from alienation to emancipation. This philosophy works pedagogically, in imagining the transformation of relations between others, as well as between self and others, including relations between coloniser and colonized, as also between and within selves.

Czarny ma tylko jeden los. I jest on biały – analiza problemów tożsamościowych społeczeństw afrykańskich w stosunkach międzynarodowych

“BLACK HAS ONLY ONE FATE. AND IT IS WHITE” – AN ANALYSIS OF THE IDENTITY PROBLEMS OF AFRICAN SOCIETIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS “Black Skin, White Masks” – the famous work of Franz Fanon is an elaborate analysis of the “Black-White” relationship, with the assumed emancipatory goal of releasing the coloured man from himself. His “black soul” is a white man’s social construct and it is impossible to get rid of it due to economic and political conditions and cultural subordination. Subsequent generations reproduced and/or superseded the problems of colonial subordination in various ways, but there is no doubt that identity attitudes still continue shaping the relationship between post-colonial communities and Western countries. I present the conclusions from Fanon’s reflections against the background of a short introduction to the issue of collective identities and the importance of their analysis for the study of international relations. The research goal of the article is to show how civilisational subordination disrupted the shaping of identity processes in colonised communities at the individual and collective level.

Between Privacy, Alienation and Community

Abstract This paper is concerned with Stanley Cavell’s reading of the notion of privacy as it appears in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument (PLA). Defined as a fantasy or fear either of inexpressiveness or excessive expressiveness (cf. Cavell 1979: 254), I argue that such an account is partial, in that it does not represent those individuals that are exposed to epistemic injustice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s seminal work Epistemic Injustice (2007) and on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I trace some similarities between the conditions of marginalized subjectivities and the private language speaker. This comparison suggests a correction of Cavell’s words and discloses an understanding of the clarificatory import that Wittgenstein’s PLA conveys, rendering it a way to resist marginalization and alienation due to the logical impossibility of a private language. In the second part of the paper (section 3), I consider two other Cavellian notions, namely the “claim to community” and ‘the turn to the ordinary’. Following the line of criticism developed in section 2, which revolves around the need of considering the situatedness of marginalized subjectivities and the oppressive character of the dimension of the ordinary, I try to implement Cavell’s concepts. I do so by taking into account (i) the Wittgenstein-inspired wider conception of rationality Alice Crary (2015) purports and (ii) the practices of some feminist consciousness-raising groups that were active in Milan (Italy) during the Seventies and some ideas developed by feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi. These contributions show that it is possible to maintain the general asset purported by Cavell, but they also call for criteria for better defining on which principles a community can form and which role the collectivity plays in revising the structure of the ordinary.

Fanon’s Postcolonial Critique of Hegelian Recognition and Buck-Morss’ Haiti Thesis

This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.F.W. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I conclude that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel from the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims.

Touching the wounds of colonial duration: Fanon's anticolonial critical phenomenology

AbstractI counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon, instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). I show how he creates his own method through an anticolonial phenomenology of touch and affect that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the center of most phenomenologies before him. I read Fanon's “toucher du doigt”—in contrastive relation to Edmund Husserl's touch‐sensings—to define a phenomenology that dwells with colonial wounding and holds the memory of a “burning” colonial duration. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description; rather, Fanon invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell. This method addresses the conditions of possibility for doing (critical) phenomenology. Fanonian phenomenology makes tangible the (de)structuring violence through which colonialism ontologizes itself, while providing tools to dwell with the wounding and critically mine it—to create possibilities for living otherwise than what colonialism makes of us.

An Examination of Identity and Colonialism in Tayeb Saleh's Season of Migration to the North through the Lens of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks A Comparative Study

"In the exploration of post-colonial literature, Tayeb Saleh's 'Season of Migration to the North' and Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks' emerge as pivotal works that intricately dissect the complex interplay between identity and colonialism. Both authors delve into the psychological ramifications of colonial histories on individual identities, unraveling the multifaceted layers of the post-colonial experience. The themes of identity and colonialism in Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North" through the lens of Frantz Fanon's seminal work, "Black Skin, White Masks." By examining the experiences of the protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, who returns to Sudan after studying in England, the essay delves into the complex ways in which colonial encounters shape individual identity. Drawing on Fanon's theories, particularly the concepts of double consciousness and the psychological effects of colonization, the analysis sheds light on the psychological and cultural impact of the colonial experience on Sa'eed and other characters in the novel. This article investigates the idea of cultural hybridity and the ambivalence that arises from navigating multiple cultural influences. Moreover, it explores the gender dynamics present in both works, emphasizing the power imbalances and objectification of women within the colonial context. Through a comparative analysis, the article seeks to highlight the characters' struggles for authentic selfhood and the broader implications of their experiences in a post-colonial world. Ultimately, this exploration provides insights into the enduring relevance of these themes and the intricate interplay between identity and colonialism in literature. The present article seeks to examine the nuanced ways in which Saleh's narrative and Fanon's psychoanalytic insights intersect, offering a profound understanding of the profound impact of colonialism on the construction and negotiation of identity in a post-colonial world."
 Tayeb Salih's novel, Season of Migration to the North, delves into the intricate relationships that exist between colonialism and identity in post-colonial Sudan. In close resemblance to Frantz Fanon's groundbreaking work Black Skin, White Masks, the article explores the novel's complex concerns of identity building, cultural hybridity, and the psychological effects of colonialism in African literature. By their audacious writings, Fanon and Salih both transformed the postcolonial African landscape. Using a postcolonial perspective, this study investigates how the story's characters navigate their cultural heritage and sense of self in the years after colonial domination.

Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropometrist

Abstract: Zora Neale Hurston's academic scholarship began in physical anthropology, measuring Black bodies and relating their statistical data to racial type. While Hurston's critics have understood her subsequent work in fiction and folklore as fleeing this troubling research, this essay reconsiders her work in anthropometry as well as the narratives of embodiment that she curated in Mules and Men . Employing what Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks theorizes as "a slow composition" (111) of "self as a body," this rereading presents Hurston as an acute critic of eugenic interpretive methods whose writings anticipate the racism built into contemporary facial recognition algorithms.

A Debilitating Colonial Duration: Reconfiguring Fanon

Abstract I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the prosthetics that colonialism imposes and the phantoms and affects of colonized life that it attempts to sever. Engaging with disability studies, especially Black and anticolonial theories, I articulate racism and (dis)ability as more than parallel or analogy and conceptualize a debilitating colonial duration, as instanced in our pandemic time. By reconfiguring the possibilities foreclosed through colonialism, I ask what routes there may be to make colonial duration hesitate and destabilize its inevitability, while dwelling with its wounds and ruptures.

Violence Is a Cleansing Force: Frantz Fanon, the Criminological Imagination, and Blade Runner 2049

Abstract Frantz Fanon is best known as the author of two monographs: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a literary and psychological account of Black experience and anti-Black racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a political manifesto arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. His critics contend that the disciplinary division evinces a failure to successfully integrate the psychological with the political, which detracts from his intellectual legacy. In this article, I employ criminologist Jon Frauley's theory of the analytic value of fictional film to demonstrate that Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (2017) not only provides an empirical referent for Fanon's psychological and political theories but also reveals an underlying coherence that is not always obvious. I begin with a summary of Frauley's theory and then alternate between Fanon's theories and the way in which the film provides those theories with empirical referents. My conclusion, which highlights an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action in Fanon, draws on both Blade Runner 2049 and the military tactic of pseudo operations, which was employed to devastating effect against anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.

Antimmanent Images: Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga , Anti-Black Temporal Prohibition, Thinking Deleuze and Afropessimism with Cinema

Abstract: This essay stages a three-way encounter between the 1972 anticolonial film Sambizanga , Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, and a Fanonian and Afropessimist critique of the human. Directed by the Black Caribbean-French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who recently passed away from complications of COVID-19, Sambizanga dramatizes a moment in the Black Angolan revolutionary struggle against Portuguese colonialism. This essay explores how the images of Sambizanga both exemplify key aspects of the modernist time-image, as formulated in Deleuze's two books on cinema (1986, 1989), and simultaneously demonstrate the time-image concept's inadequacy in describing global fundamental aspects of Black film; Sambizanga materializes a problematization of the cinematic image itself, and demands a new kind of movement. This reading of Maldoror's film facilitates an encounter between Deleuze and Afropessimism, pointing toward an antimmanent orientation. By appropriating a Deleuzian approach to cinema—the analysis of images as presentations of movement and time—for Afropessimist ends, the essay extends Frank Wilderson's (2010) critique of progressivist film narrative to indict the most basic material components of cinema. Utilizing Fanon's auto-theorizing on time and space in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008) to denaturalize temporal capacity itself and argue for its fundamental anti-Blackness, the essay locates within Sambizanga two related images of Blackness: the image of incoherence and the image of persistence.

Horrifying Whiteness and Jordan Peele's Get Out

Abstract: Horrifying whiteness is a lens by which to read the paradox of white supremacists rendering Blackness as monstrous even as they terrorize Black people by executing physical and institutional attacks against them. As its name suggests, horrifying whiteness evokes the complex relationship between white supremacy and the horror genre calling attention to the violent white supremacist performances that are enacted on and off the big screen. In this article, I introduce my concept of horrifying whiteness which draws from previous Black scholarship on the gaze such as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) but distinguishes itself by rendering white supremacy and the gaze as horrific via the horror genre. As a case in point, Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) epitomizes horrifying whiteness through its depiction of the Armitages and their clients who mask themselves as good innocent white people while they privately abduct and sell/purchase Black bodies and exploit them. By reading Peele's Get Out through the lens of horrifying whiteness, I consider how horror frameworks not only challenge white denial and white innocence, but provide a lens through which Black vulnerability can perhaps be most clearly seen.

Made in Others’ Wor(l)ds: Personhood and the Angloscene in Afro-Chinese Beijing

Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon noted in Black Skin, White Masks that the postcolonial subject's nightmares have a time and a place—a socius of the colonial encounter that haunts and recontextualizes the future of the colonized eternally within that shape-shifting nightmare. This article—exploring the English-language-mediated cosmopolitan aspirations of African students in contemporary Beijing—recasts Fanon's observation and explores how dreams of efficacious personhood, like nightmares of compromised subjectivity, imbricate the same spatiotemporal tension between aspirational horizons and their compromised conditions of mediation. In doing so, this article maps a relationship between language, personhood, and space-time: in particular, the persistence of English in Sino-South encounters where signs of Anglocentrism and Englishness become the only available forms of cultural capital for postcolonial actors.

스튜어트 홀의 영화적 협업과 이론의 시각화

This study examines the implications of the work in which theoretical thinking is visualized, realized, and embodied through art, focusing on the case of cinematic collaboration between cultural researchers and artists. To this end, the film <Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask> by British black artist Isaac Julien is compared and analyzed with the theoretical thinking of cultural researcher Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall has interacted with black artists since the 1980s, especially in the cinematic collaboration of Isaac Julien, who has shared a sense of the problem of “visualization of theory,” in his research on representation, race, and identity. Stuart Hall's thinking, which emphasized the politics of identification that moves in the characteristics of difference, self-reflection, and context dependence, is reproduced in this film around sight and boundaries. Through this, it can be confirmed that theoretical concepts that change according to history and context find a place to talk in the area of representation.

Reading Fanon on Hegel

AbstractScholars who write about Fanon's engagement with Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks divide into roughly two groups. One group takes it that Fanon engages with Hegel to critique his philosophical views. This group takes it that Fanon views Hegel as irrelevant to the Black struggle against modern, anti‐Black racism. It is easy to see why this reading is natural and tempting, given the widely held belief that Hegel's philosophy is essentially racist. The second group believes that Fanon relies on Hegel to explain the predicament of Black people who face racial discrimination. Indeed, some in this group believe that Fanon relies on Hegel to justify his call to violence in The Wretched of the Earth. I side with the second group. Fanon's engagement with Hegel is not a critique, but a thoughtful application of Hegel's thought that illustrates the connection between self‐consciousness, autonomy, and interpersonal recognition. In this article, I'll explain the positions of both camps and provide reasons to think the second camp has a better take on Fanon's reading of Hegel.

White Skin, White Mask: Constructing Whiteness in Thomas Kyd's The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda

AbstractCriticism in early modern English drama has become increasingly attentive to how the ideologies of racial Whiteness are formed on the English stage. However, this scholarship has not yet considered how White supremacy is dramatically constructed against the male, Muslim, Ottoman, a figure who, I argue, would have been performed as phenotypically white on the English stage. By examining the racialisation of the Ottoman Soliman in Thomas Kyd's late sixteenth‐century play The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, this article illustrates how anxieties around the Muslim character's white sameness are negotiated by fashioning the Whiteness, or fairness, of the Greek, Christian Perseda as ‘natural’, while correspondingly framing Soliman's whiteness as ‘artificial’. Kyd renders Soliman's whiteness in this way by drawing on early modern English cosmetic language, customs, and debates. By turning to the male Muslim Ottoman figure, this study extends understandings of how racial Whiteness was shaped in early modern English culture, by illustrating how White supremacy is developed out of a Muslim‐Christian dichotomy and therefore in conjunction with Christian supremacy.

Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gender and Racial Formations

ABSTRACT In a passing observation made while reading Joan Riviere’s theory of womanliness as masquerade, Judith Butler comments that what is hidden in masquerade is not sexuality, but rage. It’s a provocative glance at how gender and anger converge. But the quickness with which the discussion moves on from this insight suggests that this rage must also be quickly covered over by the discourse of gender. It recalls to my mind Frantz Fanon’s description of the mask, which he uses to describe how Blackness emerges through a splitting produced by the white gaze. The kind of double consciousness that results (captured in his title, Black Skin, White Masks) emphasizes how Blackness is made to exist in relation to whiteness. The anger here resides in the negotiation with these white masks, which, for Fanon, is bound up with masculinity. Although “masks” signify differently for Fanon and feminist theorists, both accounts suggest that anger becomes entangled with gender and race in ways that appear on and through the body. I consider these theories of masks and masquerade alongside two clinical vignettes to ask how anger takes shape in and through racial and gendered formations, as well as to ask how clinical material exposes the limits of these theories. Might gender contain precipitates of anger, especially residues of a relation to a rageful parent? Through a relational lens, I explore the usefulness and limitations of masks and masquerade for identifying disowned anger in the surprising ways it converges a sense of embodiment.

Repose: Black Nightmares, Black Dreams

In the key chapter of his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon articulates the critical relationship between anti-blackness—which is to say the fact of blackness—and the black body’s orientation to both trauma and and the possibilities of pleasure. Each time he is confronted by his blackness made abject,—“Look a Negro!” “Mama, a Negro!”—he stumbles and is fractured, the pieces falling to the floor; he finds himself “sprawled out, distorted;” or crawling on all fours. Through his descriptions of the physical outcomes of black abjection, Fanon demonstrates the manner in which racialized trauma reorients the black body to the world. It is rendered prostrate. He also intimates resilience strategies for a new humanism. Using this as the departure point, this paper examines how racialized trauma is metabolized, to use a term first deployed by Resmaa Menakem, through the performance of death and sleep, both requiring the body to repose. Understanding that the necropolitical conditions under which black people live frequently exposes them to death and routinely deprives them of high quality sleep, I look at the die-in and what I am calling the nap-in. These are two forms of performance art that are used in this context to explore how, on one hand, the black body is forced into prostration through ultraviolence, and on the other hand, it is coaxed into recumbency through the lures of rest and relaxation. I particularly examine the aesthetics and politics of staging the black body, already the site of social death, as the site and sight of actual death during the die-in as it has been deployed in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise I investigate artists niv Acosta’s and Fannie Sosa’s project Black Power Naps through which they propose the black body can be the site of the pleasures and joys that are experienced by way of the quotidian. Ultimately, this paper argues that each of these performances—and between their two poles—points to Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” which affirms black life’s staking a claim on the world.

Frantz Fanon’s Psycho-Politics From Psychiatry to Revolution

This article examines the relationship between psychiatry and politics in the thought of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The article aims to demonstrate that Fanon developed a unique approach to psycho-politics that dialectically engages psychiatry and politics from his earliest works. Fanon’s psycho-politics can be traced from his work in the early 1950s, namely his doctoral dissertation and Black Skin, White Masks (1952). From his doctoral dissertation to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon tries to explain colonialism as a psychiatrist. This search manifests itself again in Fanon’s best-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Although The Wretched of the Earth is known as the influential work of a political militant, it is the book of a scientist-thinker who analyzes colonialism from a psychiatric perspective. However, the connection between Fanon’s psychiatric thought and practice and his political writings has not been sufficiently revealed. Fanon has been thought of as a ‟Third World militant.” But there is a dialectical relationship between Fanon’s theory and practice of psychiatry and his political thought. Understanding Fanon’s thought can only be possible by analyzing its psycho-political structure. The aim of this article is to examine the development of Fanon’s political thought through his earliest psychiatric writings and clinical practice, to link psychiatric theory and practice to his political theory, and thus to outline Fanon’s psycho-politics.

Transcendence and Dialectics: Note on a Note from Black Skin, White Masks

ABSTRACT This article excavates the meaning of Fanon’s declaration against Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks, “between the white man and me the connection was irremediably one of transcendence,” which is attached to a footnote that has received little attention from Fanon’s commentators: “In the sense in which the word is used by Jean Wahl in Existence humaine et transcendence.” The goal of this article is to clarify what Wahl meant by “transcendence,” and what such a conception might tell us about Fanon’s disagreement with Sartre and his view of dialectics more broadly. Ultimately, the article shows that Wahl, following Kierkegaard, conceives of transcendence as a relationship of qualitative difference, which is constitutive of our subjectivity. It is thus this relationship of difference, of a nonreciprocal exclusion that cannot be sublated, that Fanon posits between white and Black.

Psychosis as a potential mental health consequence of racism

Introduction Evidence shows that racism can have a negative effect on mental health in the lived experiences of Black people and People of Colour. In critical theory discourse including postcolonial and decolonial approaches, racism is suggested to be an everyday phenomenon. Additionally, racism specifically targets the perceived cultural and phenotypic foreignness of Black migrants and migrants Of Colour, as well as the ascribed migrant status attributed to the perceived foreignness of racialized persons who do not actually have any direct migration experiences. Objectives The stigma associated with severe mental disorders such as psychosis has historically been applied to Black people and People of Colour who have been engaged in anti-racist activism as a form of punishment and social control. Higher incidence rates of psychosis in racialized communities have frequently been conceptualized as cultural differences in family composition and levels of expressed emotion in families. The objective of this study is to sensitively investigate psychosis as a potential mental health consequence of racism. Methods The incidence rates of psychosis - positive symptoms, negative symptoms, non-affective psychosis disorders and first episode psychosis - among migrants by country of migration were compiled in an umbrella review, which offers a summary of meta-analyses. Quantitative research has the limitation of enabling the observation of patterns but not allowing an understanding of the reasons behind them to be theorized through the data. Therefore, qualitative methods complement the quantitative data. Twenty people of diverse genders who self-identified as Black people or People of Colour in Berlin were interviewed about their experiences of racism and sexism and about how those experiences affected their mental health. Results The umbrella review found an association between migration and psychosis, with migration from the Caribbean and African countries showing the strongest correlation. A constant comparative analysis of the qualitative data suggests that racism contributes to the emergence of a subclinical psychosis symptomatology profile that consists of a sense of differentness, negative self-awareness, paranoid ideation regarding general persecution, and self-questioning with self-esteem instability. Conclusions The findings are interpreted as a situational diagnosis, as coined by the psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon in the seminal book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1975). The findings are also contextualized within a critique of institutional racism, both historically and currently, and within an intersectional discussion of the need for structural competency and the provision of safety for racialized groups in clinical settings. Disclosure of Interest None Declared