Black Skin, White Masks

English language

Published Nov. 23, 2008

ISBN:: 978-0-8021-4300-6

(1 review)

Black Skin, White Masks (French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and intellectual from Martinique. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, in which Fanon shares his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority. The violent overtones in Fanon can be broken down into two categories: The violence of the colonizer through annihilation of body, psyche, culture, along with the demarcation of space. And secondly the violence of the colonized as an attempt to retrieve dignity, sense of self, and history through anti-colonial struggle.

3 editions

possm reviewed Peau noire, masques blancs by Frantz Fanon

Psychology of the colonized

4 stars

Fanon takes a lot from psychoanalysis in his description of the psychological effects of colonialism. He describes the subjectivity of the oppressed who are led to identify with their oppressor and are alienated from themselves. He replies to a lot of other texts, quotes a lot of black poets. He replies to Sartre, it made me want to read Sartre's "question juive". He also replies to some authors that are irrelevant nowadays, these parts are a little boring because he kinda assumes that the reader has read them. The parts about white women wanting to be raped, or about white racists being repressed homosexuals, sound pretty bad nowadays. All in all, he is at his most astute when describing the condition of the colonized (which, luckily, is most of the book). He gets a little weird and bad when psychoanalyzing the colonizers. Some passages are really well written and highly …

Fanon takes a lot from psychoanalysis in his description of the psychological effects of colonialism. He describes the subjectivity of the oppressed who are led to identify with their oppressor and are alienated from themselves. He replies to a lot of other texts, quotes a lot of black poets. He replies to Sartre, it made me want to read Sartre's "question juive". He also replies to some authors that are irrelevant nowadays, these parts are a little boring because he kinda assumes that the reader has read them. The parts about white women wanting to be raped, or about white racists being repressed homosexuals, sound pretty bad nowadays. All in all, he is at his most astute when describing the condition of the colonized (which, luckily, is most of the book). He gets a little weird and bad when psychoanalyzing the colonizers. Some passages are really well written and highly quotable.