Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal

The Creole port city: cosmopolitanism, intimate encounters and republican ideals in twentieth-century Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal

“…9 We could also venture that such women were seen as a threat to any anti-colonial, anti-racist project. This seems to have been the case in what concerns Fanon (at least if we are to believe the analyses of Memmi, Cassirer, and Twomey 1973;Vergès 1997;Bergner 1995; for a somewhat different view see Prabhu 2006). He fought in the Caribbean (against the Vichy occupation of Martinique), Morocco, and Algeria and then France during the World War II, and in the 1950s he gave support to the brewing Algerian Revolution -and was accordingly expelled from Algeria by the French government, settling down instead in neighbouring, newly-independent Tunisia (Memmi, Cassirer, and Twomey 1973).…”

“…He fought in the Caribbean (against the Vichy occupation of Martinique), Morocco, and Algeria and then France during the World War II, and in the 1950s he gave support to the brewing Algerian Revolution -and was accordingly expelled from Algeria by the French government, settling down instead in neighbouring, newly-independent Tunisia (Memmi, Cassirer, and Twomey 1973). Fanon famously shifted his identification from his native Martiniquewhich he seems to have regarded as hopelessly colonial -to Algeria (and then to Africa as a whole and the larger postcolonial world - Memmi, Cassirer, and Twomey 1973;Vergès 1997).…”

Whither Fanon?

“…25 We take it that this relation to psychoanalysis is familiar to all readers of Fanon and that there is no need to explain again why it is simply a mistake to assume that this signals some unfortunate collusion with a naive and voluntarist idea of the subject (an error that recurs whenever Fanon's work as a psychiatrist is in question, and in fact this particular type of contextualization tries to situate Fanon in terms of a particular reading of the psychoanalytic tradition and specifically in terms of a psychological inflection of that tradition by biographical history). 26 This is too simple an account of what Fanon means by subject and scarcely justifies the larger claims that Scott (and others) reads into it. In principle, at least the difference of Fanonism from psychoanalysis cannot be simply formulated in terms of a resistance to the unconscious or Oedipus (criticisms of Fanon's thinking on the grounds that it is non-psychoanalytical, as if that automatically disqualified it, have, in my view, simply failed to appreciate the political stake of Fanon's reworking of terms such as 'narcissism', 'phobia', 'affect', and 'resistance' in his structural account of racial subjects).…”

Racial fantasies and the primal scene of miscegenation

“…In recent years, critical race, postcolonial, and queer theorists have taken up the work of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a black social psychiatrist from Martinique. Gates (1992), Bhabha (1994), Vergès (1997), Fuss (1994), and de Lauretis (2002) have focused critical attention to Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952[1967]), with its explicitly psychoanalytic discussions of the workings of race and especially the intersections between race and sexuality. The postcolonial turn in critical theory – with its focus on the ambivalent subjectivity of colonial subjects – marks a break from earlier generations of scholars and activists who read, discussed, and followed Fanon’s more revolutionary treatise, Wretched of the Earth (1963): a book that explored the psychological impact of colonization and racism, and which called for decolonization.…”