1. ● Name: Malek Hinaben Ibrahimbhai
● Paper no. : 11 The postcolonial Literature
● Roll no. : 8
● Semester: MA Semester 3
● Year: 2019-21
● Enrollment no. : 2069108420200026
● Email Id: hinamalek21@gmail.com
● Submitted to: Department of English M.K. Bhavanagar
University
Topic: The Gender Role of in Fanon’s Black Skin, white Masks
2. Brief information about what is postcolonial Literature?
● Colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably.
● The word colonialism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), comes
from the Roman ‘colonia’ which meant ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’, and referred to
Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their citizenship.
● Accordingly, the OED describes it as,
A settlement in a new country … a body of people who settle in a new locality,
forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the
community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and
successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.
3. Black Skin, white masks: Frantz Fanon
● Frantz Fanon combines Autobiography, case
study, philosophy, and psychological theory in
order to describe and analyse the experience of
Black men and women in white-controlled society.
● Denon is especially interested in the experience of
Black people from French-Colonized islands in the
Caribbean, like himself, who have come to live in
France themselves.
● He explores how these people are encouraged by a
racist society to want to become white, but then
experience serious psychological problems
because they aren't able to do so.
4. The Gender Role of in Fanon’s Black Skin, white Masks
● In Black Skin, White Marks, Women are considered as subjects almost
exclusively in terms of their sexual relationships with men.
● feminine desire is thus detined as an overly literal and limited sexuality.
● But though feminine subjectivity clearly deserves broader description, the
dimensions of its confinement within Black Skin, White Maska indicate the
architecture of raced masculinity and femininity in the colonial context.
5. Black women's Subjectivity - Race and Gender
● By examining the role of gender in black skin, white masks;
● I am too broad and phonons outline of black women Singh
subjectivity and to work toward delineating the interdependence of
race and gender.
● Although they made from a common construction of otherness in
psychoanalysis discourse, wrestling difference and sexual difference
intersect and interact in contextually variable.
6. Mythical significance for postcolonial theorists
● It is gesturing toword multicultural context nearly forestalls a gender
critique of Black skin white Masks.
● Fanon's recuperation as a “Global theorist,” Gates notes that fanon is
mobilized as an “Ethnographic constract” and is used as “ Both totem and
text” to model a “ Unified theory of pression.
● According to Gates, pressing fanon into the service a global theory of
Colonialism products either a “Sentimental romance of alterity’ complete
with a Utopian vision of fully achieved in dependence from the colonial
relation or a conception of that relation as closed, inescapable system.
7. Visual Difference: Is the Gaze white?
As Homi Bhabha notes,
“WITH A QUESTION THAT ECHOES FREUD'S WHAT DOES
WOMEN WANT”?
Fanon turns to “Confront the colonized world”, In contrast of
Freud's Question...
The question that launches Fanon's inquiry,
“What does the black man want?”
‘Que venut I’ homme noir?’
8. Fanon's experience of corporeal disintegration under the white
gaze:
● The relationship between viewer and scene is always one of fracture,
partial identification, pleasure and distrust. As if Freud found the aptest
analogy for the problem of our identity as human subjects in failures of
vision or in the violence which can be done to an image as it offers itself to
view.
● Vision is instrumental in producing both racial and sexual difference. But
the violence done to spectator is not the same as that done to spectacle in
the scopic regimes of race and gender. Sexual difference may operate in a
visual field, but men and women are accorded disparate positions in that
differentiation.
9. Fanon and the woman and colour
● "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and its correlative chapter,
"The Man of Color and the White Woman", provide a gendered comparison
of the desire of some colonized blacks to inhabit whiteness through a
sociosexual relationship with a white partner.
● Doane links this psychosexual de- sire to mimicry:
The black's confrontation with whiteness is automati- cally pathological and
most frequently takes the form of a certain mimicry. This mimicry is
characteristic of both sexes and Fanon devotes a separate chapter to each,
making his analysis circulate around a literary text in each instance. ("Dark
Continents" 219)
10. Hierarchies of Difference
● An elegiac analysis of Black Skin, White Masks by Homi Bhabha,
Fanon's foremost postcolonial ex- plicator and the staunchest advocate
of his psycho- analytic approach, exemplifies the critical tendency to
gloss over Fanon's elision of gender.
● Bhabha's essay, "Remembering Fanon," strives to preserve Fanon's
near-mythical stature while acknowledg- ing Fanon's theoretical limits.
11. ● Bergner, Gwen. "Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in
Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." PMLA, vol. 110, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75-
88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/463196. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020.
● Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Tr. Richard Philcox, Grove
Press, 2008.
● Loomba, Ania (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. Routledge. p.
41. ISBN 978-0415350648.
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