Frantz Fanon was a significant anti-colonial thinker from Martinique. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, he draws on his personal experiences with racism in France and Algeria to critically examine colonial politics and the psychology of racial oppression. Fanon explores how colonialism imposed rigid binaries of black and white identity, causing alienation. He analyzes the trauma of being viewed only through the white gaze and having to speak French to participate in colonial culture. Fanon's work was influential in developing theories of colonial inferiority complexes, resistance to cultural hegemony through language, and the dialectic relations of the colonizer and colonized.

1. DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
M.K.B.U.
Name: Dave Nimesh
M.A.
Sem- 3
Paper-11( Post Colonial Literature)
Fanon's personal experiences and Black Skin White Mask.

2. Frantz Fanon
• Most significant &
influential Anti- Colonial
revolutionary thinker.
• Born in Fort-de-France,
Martinique in 1925.
• He grew up thinking of
himself as French.

3. Experience of Racism
• Educated at French
school, and before
finishing his education,
he fought for French in
Second World War.
• Even while serving his
country, Fanon
experienced Racism
from his French allies.

4. Caste system in Army
• Criticized Caste system within Army-
• Whites positioned at top & the Blacks first
sent into battle from bottom.
• After the end of War, Fanon went to study
Psychiatry in Lyon, and published Black Skin
and WhiteMask.

5. • Rigid classification of the "Negro" as inferior
and the 'Other'.
• After finishing school, Fanon took position at
Bilda-Joinville Psychiatric hospital in Algiers,
where he bagan to investigate culturally
sensitive approaches to madness.
• Algerian war of independance & Fanon caught
up in revolutionary struggle.

6. In Black Skin and White Mask, he is highly
critical of colonial politics and he gives vent to
his anger towards the colonizer's sense of
superiority and stereotyping "Black identity".
Fanon as militant and Psychoanalytical
thinker.

7. Fanon repeatedly refers to Sartre in "BSWM",
comparing the alienation of the black man with
Sartre's discussion of Jewish identity in ‘Anti-
Semite and Jew' (1948).
Both were deeply engaged in political anti colonial
movement and to protean form of humanity free
from political totalitarianism.

8. personal experience
• He explores in book, the way he was treated.
• Colonialism bring not integration but
separation.
• French society failed to welcome him but
made him feel both foreign and inferior or
subordinate.
• Black and White as a stark binary opposition.

9. • Black and White are rigidly polarized, there is
no communication or blurring between them.
• "The White man is sealed in his Whiteness.
Black man in his blackness.
• "What is often called the black soul is a white
man's artifact".

10. • "The Fact of Blacknees" describes the
alienation of black man in France.
• His demand for attention actual lived
experience( dont judge without experience)

11. • Fanon's autobiographical persona tells his
shock when he observes a young boy pointing
to him and crying, "Mama, see the Negro, I'm
frightened".
• The little boy associates Fanon's black skin
with a whole gamut of stereotypes, including
illiteracy, physical strength, canibalism, racial
defects, slave ships etc.

12. • Fanon describes the trauma of being forced
to look at himself from outside- Fixed and
objectified by White man's gaze.

13. Language
• French remains the colonial language & its
usage signals a participation in the culture of
the colonizer.
• The black man's use of French compromises
his sense of identity, and constitutes the white
mask.
• In using French, the black becomes whitened.
he is masked by colonial culture & divorce
himself from 'native' identity.

14. • The black man as a result caught up in a double
mind. In speaking local dialects, he perpetuates
his subordinate position and allows the white
man to retain his perceptions of the black man’s
linguistic incompetence.
• In speaking French, he reinforces the hegemony
of the colonial language and supports the
culture that necessarily accompanies it.

15. • In discussing Inferiority complex, Fanon draws
on ‘Octave Mannoni’s’ Prospero and Caliban:
The Psychology of Colonization (1956)- Fanon
also objects Mannoni’s assertion that the
black man was colonized because he was
dependent on European, and reverse the logic
so as to stress how the European precisely
made the black man dependent through the
imposition of colonial system.

16. Bhabha, Alfred Adler & Hegel
• “The Negro symbolizes the biological”.
• Bhabha have uncovered the ambivalence in
Fanon’s notion of the colonial Psyche.
• Fanon uses Adler to argue that “The Negro is
comparison”.
• In his reading of Hegel, Fanon argues that the
relation between the black man and the white
man resembles Hegel’s dialectic between the
master and the slave.

17. Fanon finishes Black Skin white mask
by telling that allow the self to touch,
feel, experience his otherness: “why not the
quite simple attempt to touch the other,
to feel the other, to explain the other to
myself”.