Fanon on the Gaze, Antiblackness, and Lived-Experience

A discussion of Chapter Five from Black Skin, White Masks, with attention to how the white gaze both structures lived-experience in an antiblack world and is a primary site of the reproduction of an antiblack world. Fanon's claim that the white person (child, in his example) naming his raced body - "Look, a Negro!" - is the equivalent of shouting a racial slur underscores the proximity of everyday language to the racist structure of the interracial world. That racist structure flows through, and is dependent upon, the power of the white gaze to organize the epidermal structure of lived-experience - we are embodied in our relation to one another - around terms of hate, subjugation, and abjection. In other words, the power of the gaze to see and reproduce the location of the Black body in the zone of non-being.

What is Black Existentialism?

Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experience, had such a deep impact on Black thinkers across the diaspora. We will see these existentialist insights register in literature, philosophy, and film. Old and new.