DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISHM.K.B.U.

Name: Dave NimeshM.A.

Sem- 3Paper-11( Post Colonial Literature)

Fanon's personal experiences and Black Skin White Mask.

Frantz Fanon

• Most significant & influential Anti- Colonial revolutionary thinker.

• Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique in 1925.

• He grew up thinking of himself as French.

Experience of Racism

• Educated at French school, and before finishing his education, he fought for French in Second World War.

• Even while serving his country, Fanon experienced Racism from his French allies.

Caste system in Army

• Criticized Caste system within Army-• Whites positioned at top & the Blacks first

sent into battle from bottom.• After the end of War, Fanon went to study

Psychiatry in Lyon, and published Black Skin and WhiteMask.

• Rigid classification of the "Negro" as inferior and the 'Other'.

• After finishing school, Fanon took position at Bilda-Joinville Psychiatric hospital in Algiers, where he bagan to investigate culturally sensitive approaches to madness.

• Algerian war of independance & Fanon caught up in revolutionary struggle.

In Black Skin and White Mask, he is highly critical of colonial politics and he gives vent to his anger towards the colonizer's sense of superiority and stereotyping "Black identity".

Fanon as militant and Psychoanalytical thinker.

Black Skin and White Mask

Fanon repeatedly refers to Sartre in "BSWM", comparing the alienation of the black man with Sartre's discussion of Jewish identity in ‘Anti- Semite and Jew' (1948).

Both were deeply engaged in political anti colonial movement and to protean form of humanity free from political totalitarianism.

Jean Paul Sartre

personal experience

• He explores in book, the way he was treated.• Colonialism bring not integration but

separation.• French society failed to welcome him but

made him feel both foreign and inferior or subordinate.

• Black and White as a stark binary opposition.

• Black and White are rigidly polarized, there is no communication or blurring between them.

• "The White man is sealed in his Whiteness. Black man in his blackness.

• "What is often called the black soul is a white man's artifact".

• "The Fact of Blacknees" describes the alienation of black man in France.

• His demand for attention actual lived experience( dont judge without experience)

• Fanon's autobiographical persona tells his shock when he observes a young boy pointing to him and crying, "Mama, see the Negro, I'm frightened".

• The little boy associates Fanon's black skin with a whole gamut of stereotypes, including illiteracy, physical strength, canibalism, racial defects, slave ships etc.

• Fanon describes the trauma of being forced to look at himself from outside- Fixed and objectified by White man's gaze.

Language

• French remains the colonial language & its usage signals a participation in the culture of the colonizer.

• The black man's use of French compromises his sense of identity, and constitutes the white mask.

• In using French, the black becomes whitened. he is masked by colonial culture & divorce himself from 'native' identity.

• The black man as a result caught up in a double mind. In speaking local dialects, he perpetuates his subordinate position and allows the white man to retain his perceptions of the black man’s linguistic incompetence.

• In speaking French, he reinforces the hegemony of the colonial language and supports the culture that necessarily accompanies it.

• In discussing Inferiority complex, Fanon draws on ‘Octave Mannoni’s’ Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956)- Fanon also objects Mannoni’s assertion that the black man was colonized because he was dependent on European, and reverse the logic so as to stress how the European precisely made the black man dependent through the imposition of colonial system.

Bhabha, Alfred Adler & Hegel• “The Negro symbolizes the biological”.• Bhabha have uncovered the ambivalence in

Fanon’s notion of the colonial Psyche.• Fanon uses Adler to argue that “The Negro is

comparison”.• In his reading of Hegel, Fanon argues that the

relation between the black man and the white man resembles Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the slave.

Conclusion

Fanon finishes Black Skin white mask by telling that allow the self to touch, feel, experience his otherness: “why not the

quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself”.