Blackness, Colorism, and Epidermalization of Inferiority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck: A Fanonian Reading of the Play (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
The Problem of Being Black in Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck
Human physical features such as skin color usually play an important role in defining who the person is. In many societies skin color contributes to determining social status and self-worth. This problems becomes more acute in case of women whose markers of beauty like having lighter skin mean she can enjoy more privileges in terms of partner choice, work, and status than women of dark skin. The present paper aims at exploring the impact of skin color on the life of Emma who is color stricken in Zora Neale Hurston Color Struck. Rather than discussing this issue in relation to the color-based discrimination by the white-dominated society against the black in Americ, the play focuses on the pernicious effects of internalizing the color-based feelings of inferiority among the black themselves. The paper argues that obession with one's skin color is not conduisve to one's well-being. Rather than happiness and empowerment, it leads to self-marginalization and lifelong anxiety.
Refusing pathology: Black redaction in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2024
The final chapter of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth includes several psychiatric case histories that speak to the indelible effects of the deathly atmospherics of colonialism on the psychology of the colonized. Though Fanon reveals that these case histories are drawn from his own clinical practice in Algeria, he almost entirely refuses to contextualize their inclusion in the text, and even warns that his presentation intentionally 'avoid[s] any semiological, nosological, or therapeutic discussion'. In this article, I read Fanon's case histories in Wretched in terms of Christina Sharpe's notion of Black redaction, which she adumbrates in her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as a critical strategy for 'imagining otherwise' that seeks to counter the generalized anti-Black atmosphere that still governs the world in the wake of transatlantic slavery. My argument is that in presenting the case histories of Wretched in refusal of dominant psychiatric discourses, Fanon engages a Black redactive strategy that aims to imagine the psychological effects of colonization otherwise than through the pathologizing colonial frames by which racialized and colonized lives are systematically rendered invisible. Further, I contend that reading Fanon's case histories in such Black redactive terms enables us to recognize that his clinically inflected political thought is not premised on a valuation of pathology, as has been argued by his Black optimist (Fred Moten) and Afro-pessimist (Jared Sexton) readers alike. In fact, as I conclude by arguing in response to these readings, at play in Fanon's Black redactive strategy in Wretched is not a valuation of pathology, but the matter of its transvaluation.
Against Declination: Anti-Blackness, Subjectivation, and Parabasis
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2023
This essay attempts to think the clinamen of the World-of modernity's politico-Symbolic order-as the chattel slave trade by considering slavery's "afterlife" through critically interweaving the literature of Mladen Dolar, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Noela Davis with that of contemporary Black scholars whose writing so necessarily challenges and radicalizes the formers'. Through engagement with the thought of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Calvin Warren, clinamen, with its various parts and affects (division, den, and encounter among them), is invoked to conceptualize the anti-Black World's construction and constant politico-symbolic reification and reproduction.
2017
In this article, we will engage with Frantz Fanon’s two prominent theses of Black Skin, White Masks, the epidermalization of inferiority (inter- nalization process of colonial oppression) and racial epidermal schema (bodily embodiment of racial oppression), in order to refine our under- standing of race beyond its traditional concepts. We will focus on how race pertains to racialization, which functions through internalization of racial oppression. On this basis, we will investigate how racial oppression influences colonized subjects’ possibility of existence, and how the case of French colonialism could help us to unpack current complex issues of black racism.
Resistance Through Re-Narration: Fanon on De-constructing Racialized Subjectivities
African Identities
Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.