Name:-Italiya.kinjal.B.

Paper –E-C 305Posts–Colonial Literature

Topic: - Black Skin, White Masks

Roll No:-09

Batch: - SEM -III       

Submitted to:-Dr.Dilip Barad

Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book written by Frantz Fanon originally published in French as Peau noire, masques Blancs.In this study, Fanon uses psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a White world. The behavior, Fanon argues, is even more evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire status symbols. Black Skin, White Masks remained obscure for decades after its initial publication. Since the 1980s, it has become well-known as anti-colonial   and anti- racist   work in English-speaking countries. We find…

Internalization of Racism

•     Inferiority complex

•      Representation: White and Black community

In this fanon talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, Inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement. He takes about following topic.

Ø The Negro and Language

Ø The Woman of Color and the White Man

Ø The Man of Color and the White Woman

Ø The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized

                Peoples

Ø The Fact of Blackness

Ø The Negro and Psychopathology

Ø The Negro and Recognition

Ø By Way of Conclusion

 Why Frantz Fanon Writing this book”?

Ø Striving for a new humanism.

Ø Understanding Mankind.

Ø Our Black Brothers.

Ø I believe in you, Man.

Ø Racial prejudice.

Ø Understanding and Loving. 

 

Introduction

Beginning of the chapter…

 “I want to be recognized not as black but as white.. By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.”

              Mindset or psychology of racism by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist, black post-colonial thinker. The book looks at the condition which goes through the minds of Blacks and Whites.

“I think it would be good if certain things were said: Fanon and the epidemiology of oppression”

The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us

Towards an imminent experience: the explosion wills not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world envisages and aims to create. We are presented with a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious: I do not come with timeless truths; fervor is the weapon of choice

of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.

            For Fanon such a myth of Man and Society is fundamentally undermined in the colonial situation where everyday life exhibits “constellation of delirium” that mediates the normal social relations of its subjects: “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.” What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact,”“What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artefact,”Fanon writes. This transference, I’ve argued, speaks otherwise. It reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation

Itself; its split representations stage that division of “body” “soul” which enacts the of “identity”; a division which cuts across the fragile skin – black and white—of individual and social authority. What emerges from the Figurative language I have used to make such an argument is three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identify action in the Analytic of desire.

“What does a man want?”  

Ø The Black man wants to be white.

Ø The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man.

Ø The white man is locked in his whiteness.

What is colonial psyche and unconscious desire?

          Fanon’s demand for apsychoanalyticexplanation emerges from the perverse reflections of “civil virtue” in the alienating acts of colonial governance: the visibility

of cultural “mummification” in the colonizer’s avowed ambitionto civilize or modernize the native which results in “archaic inert institutions [that function] under the oppressor’s supervision likes caricature of formerly fertile institutions”; or the validity of violence in the very defi nition of the colonial social space; or the viability of the febrile, fantasmatic images of racial hatred that come to be absorbed and acted out in the wisdom of the West.

The vision of Black man

•     Forbidden values

•     Escapism from being individual black

•     “X is black, but misery is blacker.”

The Black men and Language

qIf you do, not learn the White men’s language than you are unintelligent. 

qThe White men: Always Black, never fully human.

  No matter how much education they have or well they act.                

Role of Fear:

q White men's fear: Black men are viewed as mindless, violent, animal being.

qWhite men think that they will take White women from them. 

Fanon says that he has only           
                     one right and one duty

qThe right to demand human behavior from the other.

qThe duty to never let his decision renounce his freedom.

The Negro and Language

These all are important point

•     Importance of Language

•     The Negro and the White

•     Negro’s behavior with the White people

•     Mastery of the Language

Inferiority complex created

•     The colonizer and the colonized

•     Negros were serving in the French army

•     “Language can make you whiter”

•     “He doesn’t even know how to speak, French.”

•     Negro improving Language

•     Reading aloud in house and wanted to improve diction

•     Negro loses his identity – psychoanalytical “failures”

•     “Here Is A Black Man Who Handles The French Language Unlike Any White Man Today”.

•      “To Speak A Language Is To Appropriate Its World And Culture”.

The fifth chapter, which I have called “The lived Experience of the Black Man”. White civilization and European culture have imposed an existential deviation on the black man.

Etimble says, “Now you who are a Negress…”“Me, a Negress? Can’t you see I’m almost white, I hate niggers, Niggers stink? They’re dirty and lazy. Don’t ever mention niggers to me.”

Women of color and the white man

•        Secretly she wants to be white. she says  that “I loved him because he had blue eyes blond hair and light skin”

•        She only wants to join white word

•        But they never loved by white

•        Losing their identity    

•        Man of color and the
 white woman

•        “ I want to be recognized not as black but    

     As white…. Who better than the white      

     Woman to bring this about? By loving me

     She proves me that I am worthy of a

    White love. I am loved liked a white man.

    I am white man.”

Conclusion

¡ “The Collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is the result of what I shall call the ‘unreflected’ imposition of a culture” .In the collective unconscious; Black ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality: In other words he is Negro who is immoral. 

q At last he says that… One last prayer:

                       O my body, always

 Make me a man who questions!