Frantz Fanon on Colonial Violence and Black Consciousness

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, served in the Free French Forces during the Second World War, and trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon under Léon-Aimé Fanon's own teacher, before publishing his first major work, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), in 1952. Written partly as his (rejected) medical thesis before being reworked for publication, the book combines psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and existentialist philosophy to analyze the psychic damage inflicted on Black colonial subjects by a white-dominated symbolic order. Its most famous scene, the encounter on a train in which a white child cries "Look, a Negro!" ("Tiens, un nègre!"), dramatizes what Fanon calls the imposition of "epidermalization," the internalization of an inferiorizing racial gaze that fractures the Black subject's bodily schema and self-image; Fanon draws here on Sartre's account of "the look" in Being and Nothingness and on Alfred Adler and Jacques Lacan, while also directly critiquing Octave Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban (1950) for pathologizing the colonized rather than the colonial situation itself.