This has not proved to be the most productive weekend for reading thus far, but I have managed to read the introduction and first chapter, "The Black Man and Language," of Black Skin, White Masks. Before I get into it, I should say that I thought I had read some Fanon in the postcolonial lit class I took from Dr. Irene Matthews back at NAU--and it's quite possible that I did--but I don't remember it at all, and looking at it now I feel like I would have remembered Fanon's voice.
BSWM is intensely readable, for something that falls in the theory category. But I suppose Fanon didn't consider himself to be writing "theory." Which raises the question (for me, anyway, who doesn't know much about it as of yet): What did Fanon think he was writing? Who was he writing for? He poses the question himself in the introduction:
Anyway. Enough about tone. I want to wrap this up, so I'll just say that the thing that struck me as most intriguing about Fanon's argument is that it's almost as much about masculinity as it is about race...and I'm honestly not sure he was conscious of that. In later chapters he addresses relations between men and women of different races, but I'm going to make a prediction and say that his points are going to be androcentric. It doesn't seem to me at this point that he's particularly interested in the subject formation (there it is again!) of the Antillean woman--how her position as gendered "Other" (when we use the word "gender" in these contexts, we're really just speaking euphemistically about women. Man represents the norm and is therefore genderless) complicates her relationship to race in ways that differ from men's relationship to race, etc. All of which is actually fine with me, because looking at the intersection of race anxiety and gender anxiety as it applies to men is a broad and interesting topic in itself, worthy of an isolated exploration. Fanon writes, "the black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man." This book was written in 1952, well before feminist theory as we know it took off, and yet here is Fanon making an observation about gender that I would not have expected to see predating feminist theory, when those questions become central. I suppose that one needs to go poking around into existentialism and Sartre to find the origin of that comment--and of course, Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of contemporary feminist theory, owed much to Sartre and existentialism.
Just to play some philosophical connect-the-dots, Fanon refers to Sartre, Nietzsche, Mannoni, Aime Cesaire, Andre Breton, and others. So the dominant influences in play here are existentialism and other contemporaneous French thought, Freudian psychology, negritude, and an undercurrent of Marxism. This is just for personal reference; I'll get into figuring out what that all means later.
BSWM is intensely readable, for something that falls in the theory category. But I suppose Fanon didn't consider himself to be writing "theory." Which raises the question (for me, anyway, who doesn't know much about it as of yet): What did Fanon think he was writing? Who was he writing for? He poses the question himself in the introduction:
"Why am I writing this book? Nobody asked me to.I get a sense from this that Fanon was writing to an ideal audience, whose real counterparts he did not expect would actually read it. I suppose his ideal audience would be black Antillean men, excluding highly educated men like himself. If that's the case, I would say the book is an extended political essay. It has a manifesto-like quality that I find very appealing. By "manifesto-like quality" I suppose I refer to what Dr. Raval characterized as Fanon's tendency to write from a place of anger. That anger is apparent, but well regulated. Fanon writes, "...it's time some things were said. Things I'm going to say, not shout. I've long given up shouting." Puts me in mind of a discussion that took place in a feminist theory class I took from Dr. Doreen Martinez, about Xicana feminist Ana Castillo and her "anger." In a nutshell, that conversation went something like--
Especially not those for whom it is intended."
Classmate: "I find Castillo's writing really unapproachable because she directs so much anger at white people."The point I took away from that was that we white folks have a hard time acknowledging the legitimacy of the anger of people of color, and from our position of white guilt we tend to go on the defensive. Seems obvious enough to me, now. No shit, Fanon was angry. Wouldn't you be if you had to rely on the language and cultural attitudes of your historical oppressor to formulate your understanding of yourself? (That's subject formation. See? it's only the second post and we're already applying those fancy Foucauldian terms.)
Dr. Martinez: "Why can't she be angry?"
Anyway. Enough about tone. I want to wrap this up, so I'll just say that the thing that struck me as most intriguing about Fanon's argument is that it's almost as much about masculinity as it is about race...and I'm honestly not sure he was conscious of that. In later chapters he addresses relations between men and women of different races, but I'm going to make a prediction and say that his points are going to be androcentric. It doesn't seem to me at this point that he's particularly interested in the subject formation (there it is again!) of the Antillean woman--how her position as gendered "Other" (when we use the word "gender" in these contexts, we're really just speaking euphemistically about women. Man represents the norm and is therefore genderless) complicates her relationship to race in ways that differ from men's relationship to race, etc. All of which is actually fine with me, because looking at the intersection of race anxiety and gender anxiety as it applies to men is a broad and interesting topic in itself, worthy of an isolated exploration. Fanon writes, "the black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man." This book was written in 1952, well before feminist theory as we know it took off, and yet here is Fanon making an observation about gender that I would not have expected to see predating feminist theory, when those questions become central. I suppose that one needs to go poking around into existentialism and Sartre to find the origin of that comment--and of course, Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of contemporary feminist theory, owed much to Sartre and existentialism.
Just to play some philosophical connect-the-dots, Fanon refers to Sartre, Nietzsche, Mannoni, Aime Cesaire, Andre Breton, and others. So the dominant influences in play here are existentialism and other contemporaneous French thought, Freudian psychology, negritude, and an undercurrent of Marxism. This is just for personal reference; I'll get into figuring out what that all means later.
*****
Fancy Terms:
- Negritude: A movement emerging out of African diasporic francophone communities, beginning in the 1930's, dedicated to resisting the institutionalized racism of French colonial heritage and asserting a common black identity through literature, art, and political action.
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