![]() ![]() Fanon then asserts that black men’s desire for white women can be almost vengeful in nature-a way of asserting their own power in the face of racist oppression.įanon also explores other ways in which black people are taught to aspire to whiteness. He argues that black men feel a sense of competition with other men, and that this makes them want to “win” the most prized object within the colonial sexual economy: white women. Fanon suggests that black men’s desire for white women is a little different. As a result of internalized racism, black women wish to distance themselves from blackness, and this produces their desire for white men. According to Fanon, black women’s rejection of black men is thus a form of self-hatred, even if they themselves do not recognize it as such. They have been conditioned to believe that black men are dirty, unintelligent, irresponsible, and inferior-and that white men represent the opposite of these characteristics. Fanon proposes that black women choose to date and marry white men because they have been taught to feel disgust and disapproval of blackness. However, in his examination of this phenomenon, Fanon highlights differences between the ways in which black women desire white men and the ways in which black men desire white women. Following the conventions of psychoanalysis, Fanon maintains that desire must be the primary subject of any inquiry into human behavior.įanon argues that black people are taught to desire whiteness, and it is for this reason that many black people (both women and men) also desire white romantic and sexual partners. Drawing on their biographic subjectivities, both intellectuals theorize cultural and colonial forms of oppression and seek to produce new knowledge that is based on practice and experience.Early in the book, Fanon argues that two questions are central to understanding the world: “What does man want?” and “What does the black man want?” The separation of these two inquiries emphasizes Fanon’s argument that black people are excluded from the category of humanity, and also conveys that there are important distinctions between the desires of white people and desires of black people. Living through distinct historical moments and colonial ideologies, Fanon and Hall produced theories of historical change, which rest on epistemic ruptures and conjunctural changes in meaning formations. The article first traces Fanon’s and Hall’s transboundary encounters with metropolitan Europe and then shows how these biographic experiences translate into their theories of practice and history. It demonstrates how the experience of the racialized and diasporic subject, respectively, creates a kind of subjectivity that makes visible the work of colonial cultural narratives on the formation of the self. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.Įxamining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial representations and to provide new, anticolonial imaginaries. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. ![]() In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him.
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