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BLACK SKIN,

WHITE MASKS

FRANTZ FANON

Translated by

Charles Lam Markmann

Pluto .., Press

First published in 1986 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road. London N6 5AA

Originally published in France as

Peau Noire, Masques Blanc

Copyright © 1952 Editions de Seuil

TI'anslation Copyright © 1967 Grove Press, Inc. A

CIP record for this book is available from

the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 0035 9 pbk

Impression 99 98 97 96

8 7 6 5 4

Printed in the EC by WSOY, Finland

CONTENTS

Foreword: Remembering Fanon

by Homi Bhabha vii

Introduction

9

Chapter One

The Negro and Language

17

Chapter Two .

The Woman of Color and the White Man

41

Chapter Three

The Man of Color and the White \Voman

63

Chapter Four

The So-Called Dependency Complex of

Colonized Peoples

83

Chapter Five

The

Fae:t of Blacbess

109

Chapter Six

The Negro and Psychopathology

141

Chapter Seven

The Negro and Recognition

210

Chapter Eight

By Way of Conclusion

223

FOREWORD: REMEMBERING FANON

Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition

tf!lo my body, make of me always a man who questions!

Black Skin, White Masks

In the popular memory of English socialism the mention of

Frantz Fanon stirs a dim, deceiving echo.

BlaokSkin, White

T~JYr~te1!~l!:l!i!~~~O:rt"· T!JlOilr:tl. 11e

tD§If:. memorable,titles reverberatejJl_ s.elf of'reswance'. whenever the English left gathers, in its narrow church or its Trotskyist camps, tQ._ lore the immiseration colon~g!LW:QJ'Jg. Repeatedly used ___ moral outrage, F'anon's titles emptily echo a political spirjtJhat is far fro111 Jiis.own; s_2Ymtthatmpbl~4 ~l!~ience ... that ex in the main, from an ethnocentric little EnglandiSm tq_,. large Q'1;1qe J,wonJntemationalism. When that labourist llDe of vision is challenged by the 'autonomous' struggles of the politics of race and gender, or threatened by problems of human psychology or cultural representation, it can only make an empty gesture of solidarity. Whenever questions of race and sexuality make their own organizational and theor etical demands on the primacy of 'class', 'state' and 'party' the language of traditional socialism is quick to describe those urgent, 'other' questions as symptoms of petty bourgeois deviation, signs of the bad faith of socialist intel lectuals.

Theritual respect accorded to the name of Fanon,

:.vii\ viii I Foreword .!h~J~Q!llfflQ!l_ ~~guage __ l\9QQ, are part of the ceremony of a polite, English refusal. There has been no substantial work on Fanon in the his tory of the New Left Review; one piece in the New States man; one essay in Marxism Today; one article in Socialist Register; one short book by an English author. Qflate, the b~e11 k~P! alive in the · ~f !l:gqt},g!!4.Q~~. by A. Sivanandan' s stirring' indict ments of state racism. Edward Said, himself a scholar en gage, has richly recalled the work ofF anon in his important T. S. Eliot memorial lectures, Culture and Imperialism. And finally, Stephan Feuchtwang's fine, far-reaching essay, ·Fanon' s Politics of Culture' (Economy and Society) ex amines Fanon' s concept of culture with its innovatory in sights for a non-deterministic political organization of the psyche. Apart from these exceptions, in Britain today

Fanon's ideas are effectively

·out of print'.

Memories of Fanon tend to the mythical. He is either re the prophetic spirit ofThird World Liberation" or rE;y.iled as an exterminating angel, the inspiration to viol ,ence in the Black Power movement. his hist()pc participation in the Algerian revolution and the influence of ' i~eas on the race politics of ~~~ and 1970s, s work will not be possessed by· one political moment or tnovement, not can it be easily placed in a seamless narrat Qf liberationist history. Fanon refuses to be so com pletely claimed by events or eventualities. It is the sustain ing irony of his work that his severe commitment to the pol itical task in hand, never restricted the restless, inquiring movement of his thought. It is not for the finitude of philosophical thinking nor for the finality of a political direction that we tum to Fanon. Heir to the ingenuity and artistry ofToussaint and

Senghor,

as well as the iconoclasm of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre,

Foreword I ix

t ·; ! Fanon is the of the transgressive and transitional iiiith, .ro~Y yearltfor the totaft:ransforrriation !fi~ ~Qciety' .. but he speaks most fr:It is this palpable pressure of division and dis placement that pushes

Fanon· s writing to the edge of

things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, 'exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can he horn·. 'the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville such, in the divided world of French Algeria, F.anon Jhe stereotype of the native fi.xeq at .the shifting bForeword I xi liP, shqr! the leaden, deadening g(!!!~, .. colonized world . . . i~ thi~··distinctive force of Fanon's vision that has been ;;~~~ as .. I ;b~~t. a;;"di~i~lon:'' the dis placement, the cutting edge olhis thQught? I be lieve, from the tradition of the oppressed, as Walter Ben jamin ifii tfielaiig\iage .. aware ness that 'the state of i~ which we no(fu~ ~?'ception but the rule. We musfattain to a conceptofhis tory that is in keeping with this insight.' And the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. Thestruggle,. against colonial oppression not only the direction of Je£t. very nature ofl:tumanity becomes estranged. in the oo.loniai dWOn and from that 'naked declivity' it emerges, riot a5 an assertion of will nor as an evocation of freedom, but as an enigmatic questioning.

With a, tltat echoes Freud's

what· does woman want?, Fanon turns to confront the col

Qnized wodd. 'What w~t?' h~.~~~~. }R!beintl'o

duction to.BlackSkin, White Masks, 'Whatdoes the black rpan want?' ' · · · ·· · · · .. · ·. To this loaded question where. cultural alienation bears down on the ambivalence of psychic identification, Fll!.l.QP with an agonizing performance of ·

I to meet the white man's eyes.. An weight bur

dened me. In the white world the man of colour em:ounters xii I Foreword in the development ofhis bodily schema . . . bvas battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intelle<:tual defici fetishism, ractal defects:-. . Hook myself far off from my own presence . . ·. What else cauld it be for me but an amputa tion, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body

With black blood?

FrQm within the metaphor of vision complicit with a

Western of Man>emerges the of

!he coloma! relabou. BlAck presence rums repre •$.entative narrative of Western personhood; its past tether ed. to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and de generacy will.not produce a history of civil progress,""'aspace for the Socius; its present, dismembered and disloeated. wjJlnot contain the image of identity that is questioned in t!le dialectic of mind/body Jllld resolved in the epistemology qf .and reality: .• The White man's eyes break up Black man's body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, field of vision dis turbed. ' 'What does the black man wpnt?' insists and in _privileging the psychic dimensioli' changes not only what we understand by a political demand but transforms the very means by which we recognize and identify its human agency. is not principally posing the question of pol itic81 oppression as the violation of a human ·essence', although he lapses into in his more existential IJlOment. He _is not raising the question of colonial man in the universalist terms of the liberal-humanist ('How does colonialism deny the Rights of Man?'); nor is he posing an

01,1tological question about Man's being ('Who is the aliena

ted colonial man?').

Flll}on' s question is not addressed to

sq9h a unified notion ()(history nor such a unitary concept of Man. {t_js,. Olle Qf the original and disturbing qualities of

Foreword I xiii

]!Jgclc. Skip, White tba.t. it h!stQri~ize~ .til~ ~1: "9!\ial.~"P~.~e:D~i·. ~~~~ t~ ~~Q{,Selfand Society or History and Psyche .iionable in Fanon'sidentification of the coloniai subJectwho as it romes· tcf be •iJ.I~cri~ htJhe texts of history, science, myth. The. col ooJ;;d subject is ah.vays 'Qverdeiermined ·from fan on writes. lt:-.-~.Y;..,.·:-, lrt articulating the problem of colonial cultural alienation t~e J>syc~()analytic .. . of Qlld Fanon radically questions the formation of both individual social authority as they come to be developed in the dis course of Social Sovereignity. The social virtues of historical rationality, cultural cohesion, the autonomy of individual consciousness assume an immediate, utopian identity with the subjects upon whom they confer a civil status. The civil state is the ultimate expression of the innate ethical and rational bent of the human mind; the social instinct is the progressive destiny of human nature, the necessary trans ition from Nature to Culture. The direct from indi vidual interests to social authority is objectified in the re presentative of a General Will-Law or Culture where Psyche and Society mirror each other, transparently translating their difference, without loss, into a historical totality.

FQLms of social and psychic and

Si()n -!fiadness, t(~on, viql~tJ.ce.-c.~ never be

as determinate andconstitutiveeonditions .Qf civil authority, or as the ambivalent effects of the social in- xiv I Foreword stinct itself. They always explained away as alien pres occlusions of histi>i:icijl :prqgress, the ultimate mis recognition of Man. F.:or Fanon such a myth of Man and Society is fundan:tent ally undermined in the colonial. situation everyday life exhibits a 'co,nstellation .of-delirium' mediates the iormal social relations of its subjects: enslaved py his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in with a neurotic orientation.' f!Plon' s demand for a psychoanalytic explanation emerges fr9m the perverse reflections.of 'civil virtue' in the alienat acts of governance: the visibility of cultural 'mummification' in the colonizer"'s avowed ambition to civilize or modernize the ·native which results in. 'archaic inert instibltions[that functionfunder the oppressor's sup ervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions'; or validity of violence in the very definition of the colonial social space; or the viability of the febrile, fantasmatic i!!l ages of racial hatred that come to be and acted out ip ·the wisdom of the West. jnterpositions, h1deed ()f political and psychic violence within civic virtue, alienation within identity, dtive Fanon 'to describe the splitting of the colonial space of consciousness and saciety as marked by a 1 'Manichean delirium't figure of such a ~r~~p~,.~9. .sJ•ggest, is the image of post-Enlightenment man tetl1ered t9; not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow ofcol onized manl that splits his prestmce, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time ofhis being.

T.his ambiva

lent identification of the racist world-moving on two planes without being in the least embarrassed by it, _pf the anti,.Semitic consciousness -turns on the idea of Man as his alienated iinage, not Self and Other but tl1e 'Other-::

Foreword I xv

ness' of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of col Qnial identity. And it is that bizarre figure of desire, which splits along the axis on which it turns, that compels Fanon to put the psychoanalytic question of the desire of the subject to the historic condition of colonial man. 'What is often called the black soul is a white man's artefact,' Fanon writes.

This transference, I've argued,

speaks otherwise.

It reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of

the colonial relation itself; its split· representations stage that division of'body' and 'soul' which enacts the artifice of 'identity'; a division which cuts across the fragile skin - black and white - of individual and social authority. What emerges from the figurative language I have used to make such an argument, are three conditions-that underlie an un derstanding of the process of identification in the analytic ofquotesdbs_dbs1.pdfusesText_1

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