Paper 11: The Postcolonial Literature
Name:
Sagar B Vaghela
Semester:
3
Roll
No: 32
Enrollment
No: 2069108420180052
Paper
11: The Postcolonial Literature
Topic:
Write a critique on Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks'.
Batch:
2017-19
Submitted
To: S.B.Gardi Department of English MKBU
Introduction:
Black
Skin White Mask book is written by Frantz fanon in 1952.
Frantz
fanon was well known writer and the well known critic . he famous for his writing
and critic style.
The
book is written in the style of auto-theory, in which Fanon shares his own
experiences in addition to presenting a historical critique of the effects of
racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on
the human psyche.
Black
Skin, White Masks applies historical interpretation, and the concomitant
underlying social indictment, to understand the complex ways in which identity,
particularly Blackness is constructed and produced. In the book, he applies
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain the feelings of dependency
and inadequacy that black people might experience. That the divided
self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin,
and embraced the culture of the Mother Country, produces an inferiority complex
in the mind of the Black Subject, who then will try to appropriate and imitate
the culture of the colonizer. Such behavior is more readily evident in upwardly
mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire status symbols
within the world of the colonial ecumene, such as an education abroad and
mastery of the language of the colonizer, the white masks.
Based
upon, and derived from, the concepts of the collective unconscious and
collective catharsis, the sixth chapter, "The Negro and
Psychopathology", presents brief, deep psychoanalyses of colonized black
people, and thus proposes the inability of black people to fit into the norms
(social, cultural, racial) established by white society. That "a normal
Negro child, having grown up in a normal Negro family, will become abnormal on
the slightest contact of the white world." That, in a white society, such
an extreme psychological response originates from the unconscious and unnatural
training of black people, from early childhood, to associate
"blackness" with "wrongness". That such unconscious mental
training of black children is effected with comic books and cartoons, which are
cultural media that instil and affix, in the mind of the white child, the society's
cultural representations of black people as villains. Moreover, when black
children are exposed to such images of villainous black people, the children
will experience a psychopathology (psychological trauma), which mental wound
becomes inherent to their individual, behavioral make-up; a part of his and her
personality. That the early-life suffering of said psychopathology – black skin
associated with villainy – creates a collective nature among the men and women
who were reduced to colonized populations.
Masques
Blancs (1952), hereafter Black Skin, White Masks), since in this first book,
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) himself believed that the fight against racism had
nowhere found more succour than in the United States.
Fanon
poetically describes the shorn “curtain of the sky” over the battlefield after
the Civil War that first reveals the monumental vision of a white man “hand in
hand” with a black man. Yet while blacks continue to remain segregated under
Jim Crow, the situation for the French man of colour haunted by liberal
metropolitan racism, is rather different. He remains locked in an existential
struggle for recognition, unaware that freedom means “when there are no more
slaves, there are no masters”.
Fanon
contends in Black Skin, White Masks that there is no more insidious obstacle
than racism to the realisation of our species capacities or the completion of
the historical dialectic. Of course this claim only makes sense if racism is
treated, like in Black Skin, White Masks, as a symptom of capitalism. That is,
even The Wretched of the Earth, hereafter W of E), fails to achieve the depth
of analysis in Black Skin, White Masks.
The
Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was presumably speaking about The Wretched of
the Earth, in the quip that “every brother on a rooftop” in the 1960s was able
to recite Fanon. For no one quoting Black Skin, White Masks can miss its
incisive rebuke of black militancy as proffering a chimeric freedom or its bold
claim about alienation as the exclusive privilege of a certain class of blacks.
“Fervour,”
the narrator in Black Skin, White Masks
poignantly remarks, “is the weapon of choice of the impotent”. All
references to the older translation by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove
Press, 1967) are indicated by the abbreviation CLM). The awful truth that no
one, except a handful of academic leftists interested in presenting Black Skin,
White Masks as an anti-humanist phenomenology,
reads this book anymore indicates the depth of the sea change in attitudes
about race on the left.
But
if the utopian interracial schema of Black Skin, White Masks speaks to us at
all, this is a consequence of the peculiarity of the US as a “nation of
nations,” where the experience of racism raises the dilemma of freedom with
acuteness. The historic importance of The Wretched of the Earth to the New Left
overshadows the brilliant analysis of racism in Black Skin, White Masks. Even
the appearance of a new translation on the scene scarcely alters the conditions
of this elision.
His
latest translator, Richard Philcox, in his afterword to the retranslation of
The Wretched of the Earth, explains the relevance of — or rather, expresses the
contemporary
confusion about — Fanon thus: “We cannot forget the martyrdom of the
Palestinians when we read . . . ‘On Violence’ . . . We cannot forget the
lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth, who still stream to Europe from
Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the countries of the former Eastern bloc, living
on the periphery in their shantytowns.” As Philcox laments, “(there are those
who) still unreservedly and enthusiastically adopt the thought characteristics
of the West.”
The
Freud-Marx confluence in Black Skin, White Masks sits at odds with this
politically naïve anti-imperialism. No doubt this at least partially explains
why the new translation elicits a tepid foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah. More
pointedly, Appiah reads three themes as shared across both works — a critique
of “the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis,” a bid to reckon accounts with
Negritude, and a concerted effort to develop a “philosophy of decolonisation” —
as if these formed a triptych.
However,
this is no more than a trompe l’oeil. The concern with “disalienation” in the
first book is non-identical with anxieties about “decolonisation” in the
latter: Whereas Black Skin, White Masks
analyses the wretchedness of racism under capitalism, The Wretched of
the Earth recoils from the task of pushing through what, in the conclusion to
Black Skin, White Masks, is referred to as the “pathology of freedom” by virtue
of its close identification with Third Worldism.
On
the other hand, the foreword seems apposite to this new translation, since the
choices that Philcox makes in trying to render into English the peculiarity of
the French in Black Skin, White Masks often coincide with the interpretation
Appiah advances on the thematic unity of Fanon’s oeuvre. Hence, in its
endeavour to restore some of the philosophically inflected categories
(particularly in the fifth chapter), the new translation mirrors a wider
historical trend privileging a descriptive phenomenology of race over a
psychoanalytic interpretation.
The
manner in which the new edition assumes the onus of parsing the French words
nègre or noir (“black/the black man,” “Negro,” or “nigger”) tends to blunt the
affective charge of “Negro” as well as the rhetorical use of “nigger” by
preferring to update — although by no means always — these epithets with the
more innocuous “black” or “the black man.”
Part
of the issue is that the French uses a number of words to express the gray
scale that distinguishes black skin from white, “the Creoles, the Mullattoes,
and Blacks,” that in English are collapsed into “black/black man” or the more
pejorative “Negro/nigger.” Nevertheless, the cumulative effect is that the
newer version shrouds a claim at the heart of Black Skin, White Masks : Blacks
as much as whites share the connotations or stereotypes associated with what is
“black,” so that the “nigger” is always someone else, somewhere else.
The
new, “more accurate” translation painstakingly reconstructs the specificity of
the numerous cultural references in the text, its idiosyncratic use of medical
jargon, and its loanwords from existentialism. But these virtues are limited by
the fact that it lacks the apparatus of a critical edition with which to
adjudicate matters of nuance.
Despite
its infelicities, the older translation by Charles Lam Markmann, first issued
in 1967, seems more aware of its intended audience; its age captures quaintly
the historical texture of Black Skin, White Masks. The older translation was,
in an important sense, more aware of the stakes of Black Skin, White Masks.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of modern psychoanalysis, was a key
influence in the theory of racism and black disalienation that Fanon develops
in Black Skin, White Masks.
“The
black man,” confesses the didactic narrator in the introduction, “wants to be
white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man”. This
attempt to “achieve the rank of man” is complicated by the fact that under
capitalism we share a common lot — alienation. Moreover, in the case of the
black man, this alienation results in a double bind, the “first economic, then
the internalisation or rather epidermalisation of this inferiority”.
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