Black Skin, White Masks

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.
Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. I lose my temper, demand an explanation.... Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.

We like to begin each year with a book that will challenge us with some theoretical perspectives and insights, which we can have rattling around our minds as we carry on the year’s reading. This year we are beginning with Frantz Fanon’s 1952 classic Black Skin, White Masks. A collection of essays exploring the construction of the author’s psyche (as a Black man from Martinique), Fanon looks at the personal impacts of colonialism, the ways that psychoanalysis might be adapted to understand the colonized psyche, and what possible futures might lie ahead. Chris and Suzanne explore the book’s argument and its literary qualities, as well as reflecting on how Fanon’s essays continue to resonate today.

52. Black Skin, White Masks.

The Spouter-Inn Frantz Fanon’s essay collection, on colonialism’s effects on the psyche. More episodes

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Show Notes.

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. [Bookshop.]

Also by Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth.

An overview of Fanon’s thinking.

Stuart Hall: Why Fanon? [requires institutional access, alas]

Glen Sean Coulthard: Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Reconciliation.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui: “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.

Next: Augustine: Confessions. [Bookshop.]

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