An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (2025)

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And So the Slave Becomes the Master: A Critical Evaluation of Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks'

Patricia Mapipi-Julieyvna

Existing leaders just use the same template that colonial rulers employed previously. The difference is that, instead of occurring at a transnational level, exploitation has scaled down to the intra-state level in Africa (as certain individuals in high positions live off the land-and its people-while the masses live in poverty). However, it is the duty of the oppressed to remove these shackles, both physically and mentally. As Wood (2004:54) states “how we are thrown into the world is not within our control. Each of us does, however, have some control over what we do with our throwness.” West (2010:111) reiterates this view point by saying that “human beings are free to make or remake themselves. They do not simply fulfill a predetermined essence as, it seems, plants or animals must do. If human beings embrace their freedom, they have the possibility of an authentic existence.” In light of the above, the main goal of this paper is to critically analyse Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks.” More specifically, this paper will deal with his views on language and his psychoanalysis of the relations that take place between black and white people (and between black and black people). The first section of this paper will entail a brief historical overview of his life. The purpose of this is to shed some light on any events that might have shaped his writing or the ideas he put forth. The second section will deal with his work (in the way that was outlined above). A succinct conclusion shall be provided in the end with the purpose of summing up the essay. The sources used to undertake this task were books, journals and the internet.

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Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin White Masks': New Interdisciplinary Essays.(Book review)

Jean Khalfa

The Modern Language Review, 2007

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Unmasking Fanon: An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Fifth Chapter in Black Skin White Masks Through the Five Stages of Loss

During his short life, Frantz Fanon was engaged in questions about psychiatry, philosophy, race and colonization, and through his experience as a practicing psychiatrist, political activist and author, he wrote two major works, Black Skin White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963), which have been largely influential in the field of Postcolonial studies. In the fifth chapter of his book Black Skin White Masks, Fanon describes the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, and the psychological impact of colonization on the colonized. Through an intimate description of his meeting with the French oppressor, he brings the reader into a journey of his experience as a black man, and draws a picture over the feeling of dehumanization, humiliation and identity crisis. The fifth chapter portrays the transformation of his identity through his meeting with the white man in France, which made him realize that the very fact of his blackness makes him inferior. His personal and detailed description of the process from realizing that he is different to the point of accepting his difference can be compared to a process of grief. In this case, the grief over his loss of identity the way he knew it. In this essay, I analyze Black Skin White Masks' fifth chapter, The Lived Experience of the Black Man, by linking it to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler's Five Stages of Loss, a model that describes the different processes of grief over loss and death. I conclude that Fanon's description of his identity crisis has a strong resemblance to the five stages of loss.

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The View Beyond Looking: Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

Biko Agozino

Karib, 2017

This paper is a simulation of a court hearing in which Frantz Fanon is accused of different things by different authors while I attempt to present a case for the defence of Fanon, indicating that a careful reading of his work will show that he has no case to answer. The paper arose from a plenary talk that I presented at a conference on immigrants in Europe which included the premier of the film on Fanon directed by Isaac Julien. The paper has been updated to reflect some current debates since the original presentation.

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Subjective Elasticity, the “Zone of Nonbeing” and Fanon’s New Humanism in Black Skin, White Masks

Nicholas Webber

This article argues that the all-too-easy dismissal of Frantz Fanon’s bold “new humanism” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) relies upon a bracketing of the elastic narratorial patterns which make such an imaginative leap possible in the first place. In choosing instead to foreground such triggers, this article seeks to re-establish the link between Fanon’s text, his descent into the “zone of nonbeing” and his subsequent attempt to negotiate this zone by way of a performative, non-ocular and cosmopolitan humanistic reimagining. The article also pays close attention to the ways in which Fanon’s adapted, colonial existentialism (out of which his new humanism grows) dialogues with and necessarily separates from its Sartrean basis, creating along the way a new form of nonbeing which, rather than annul colonial subjectivity, opens up a dynamic, dangerous and germinative space in which new modes of intersubjective connectivity can be imagined.

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Black Skin/White Masks: The Performative Sustainability of Whiteness (With Apologies to Frantz Fanon)

Bryant Alexander

Qualitative Inquiry, 2004

This article uses the iconic text Black Skin/White Masks by Frantz Fanon as a metonymic trope to examine the nature of White Studies through the autobiographical frame of a Black critic. The article is structured around three components. First, the socially constructed identity of “Whiteness” as embedded in, emergent from, and critiqued by those in (and of) the project of White Studies. Second, it addresses the question of how White Studies serves as a project for “sustaining Whiteness,” in light of increasing social and cultural critique of Whiteness. Third, the article initiates an argument for the performative nature of Whiteness that crosses borders of race and ethnicity. The article also address issues of authenticity embedded in the politics and intersections of performing race and culture while extending the notion of Whiteness, like Blackness, as a performative accomplishment.

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Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Sunit Singh

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Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism

derek hook

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Fanon's Lexical Intervention: Writing Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks

Doyle D Calhoun

Paragraph, 2020

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Rereading Frantz Fanon in the light of his unpublished texts

Jean Khalfa

2020

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is principally known as a great theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular through the two main books he published during his lifetime Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). What is less known is that he was in parallel a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. A volume of about a thousand pages of texts either difficult to access or presumed lost was recently published, following more than a decade of research in archives located in different parts of the world. It reveals first the importance and originality of his thought as a scientist, and secondly the importance of this dimension of his work for the understanding of his political texts. This is shown on two points: 1) the role of violence in the decolonization process, when compared with Fanon's texts on psychiatric internment, the phenomenon of agitation and the alternative model of social therapy and 2) the use of «identity» as cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, which he strongly criticised, when compared with Fanon's systematic questioning of any personal «constitution» in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric work.

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An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (2025)

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