Topic Name :- Frantz Fanon's personal Experience and "Black skin white masks"

1. Frantz Fanon’s personal experiences and
“Black skin white masks”.
Name :- Alisha S. Vaghasiya
M.A. Sem :- 3
Paper :- 11 [ Post colonial literature]
Department of English M.K.B.U

2. Frantz Fanon
 Most significant and
influential Anti- Colonial
revolutionary thinker.
 Born in Fort-de-France,
Martinique in 1925.
 He grew up thinking of
himself as French.

3. 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.

4. Caste system in Army
- Criticized Caste system within
Army
- Whites positioned at top and 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 White
Mask.

5. - 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 began to investigate
culturally sensitive approaches to
madness.
- Algerian war of independence and
Fanon caught up in revolutionary
struggle.

6. Black Skin and White
Mask
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.

7. Fanon’s 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 of
subordinate.
Black and White as a stark binary
opposition.

8. 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”.

9. “The Fact of Blackness”
describes the alienation of
black man in France.
His demand for attention
actual lived experience

10. Fanon’s autobiographical person 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, cannibalism, racial
defects, slave ships ….

11. Fanon describes the trauma of
being forced to look at himself
from outside – Fixed and
objectified by White man’s
gaze.

12. Language
The black man’s use of French
compromises his sense of identify,
and constitutes the white mask.
In using French, the black becomes
whitened. He is masked by colonial
culture and divorce himself from
‘native’ identity.

13. 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.

14. 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.