Fanon on Language, Antiblackness, and Interracial Desire

Summary and interpretations of themes in the first two chapters of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. I am interested in two aspects of the text. First, how Fanon understands linguistic practice - speaking, diction, grammar, expression - as irreducibly colonial, bearing the marks of colonial racism, and how and why creole language formations are, for him, not sites of resistance or alternative paths for expressive life. Second, why Fanon sees interracial desire as pathological and bearing all the markers of antiblackness: the desire of the Black woman to exit colonial relations through the white man, the failure of such desires, and the recurrence of antiblackness in the most intimate aspects of life.

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.