This lecture is about Frantz Fanon and his novel Black Skin, White Masks. I'm D. Elizabeth Glasgow and I'm your lecturer for this series. Who was Frantz Fanon? Frantz Fanon, the author of Black Skin, White Masks, was an Afro-French psychiatrist and philosopher.
He was born in 1925 in Montenegro. He grew up under colonial rule and as an adult he became a passionate critic of the racism that characterized the colonial system. Colonial racism assumed that colonized people were inferior to those of the ruling power and that their culture and values were also inferior.
Based upon these assumptions, it imposed its own culture and values on the colonized people, while according them an inferior status within the new society. Fanon experienced colonial rule from a very young age. In Martinique, he became friends with the influential poet, novelist, and political figure Aimé Césaire.
a radical critic of colonialism. Fanon's ideas about racism developed further on serving with the French army during World War II and when he moved to France to study medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon. He qualified as a psychiatrist in 1951 and intended to submit Black Skin, White Masks as his doctoral dissertation, but the work was considered too controversial.
The university examiners rejected it and so Fanon had the manuscript published into a book instead. In 1953, Fanon was offered a job in Algeria. The Algerian War for Independence from France began the next year. Fanon became involved with the Algerian rebel group Front de Libération Nationale in 1955, and as a result, he was expelled from the country in 1957. His experiences in Algeria had a profound effect on his later writings.
In his last book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon departed from the non-violent tone. of black skin white masks and argued that the colonized have the right to commit violence to gain independence. In 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia.
He died the following year at the age of just 36. The Wretched of the Earth was published after his death. What we're talking about today is his first novel, Black Skin White Masks. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon argued that colonial racism has psychopathological effects.
In other words, it fosters mentally disturbed behavior. One of the key terms he uses is the process of cultural assimilation. This is a process that occurs when the native culture of a colonized people is replaced by the culture of the colonial power. Fanon argued that this profoundly damages colonized people.
This damage felt on both a collective and an individual level occurs in several ways. First, the culture of colonialism prevents the colonized from developing an independent sense of identity, which in turn has a negative effect on their psychological development. The second thing it does is, because Western popular culture equates whiteness with purity and goodness and blackness with impurity and evil, the colonized people learn to equate blackness with evil.
As a result, they grow up aspiring to be white. This effort to assimilate white culture and to negate their own black identity has profound psychological repercussions according to fanon it results in a sense of alienation that is doubt as to who they truly are and with whom they should identify sooner or later fanon argued black colonial subjects realize that they have no visible identity having learned from an early age that to be black is to be subhuman they cannot identify as black at the same time their aspiration to be white is destined to fail for a black person can never truly become white. Fanon argued that the upshot of this is that the colonized are caught in an impossible bind.
They are both unable to celebrate their native culture and unable to achieve equality within the colonial culture. Fanon illustrated this by describing the experiences of different black people encountering their white colonizers for the first time. These stories share a common theme, the shock that black individuals experience Upon realizing that, despite their Western European education and loyalty in Western European ideals, white people perceive them to be fundamentally different and inferior.
Colonial culture, Fanon argued, teaches its citizens that the only way to be human is to be white. The colonized internalize this. This deeply embedded message pushes them into an agonizing psychological position. If to be human is to be white, Fanon argued, but they are not white they are forced to see themselves as subhuman fanon's approach here was unique for its time he drew upon a range of disciplines in order to build his art He used Marxism, an analytical approach to social and economic questions that was developed by Karl Marx, to show that colonial racism is also a socio-economic issue. And he used the ideas of the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to show that colonialism shapes the worldview of its citizens from their earliest years of development.
Fanon drew from the work of the writers and poets of the Negritude movement. This was a literary and philosophical movement developed by African writers who were residents in France and whose work was critical of French colonial rule. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shows how the literature of black writers articulates the displaced identity of colonized people. He also absorbed the work of existentialist philosophers like the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism argued that individuals develop by exercising their own free will.
Seen in this light, colonialism then stifles the free will of the colonized, and it is shown to be inherently dehumanizing. Finally, Fanon used the experiences of his own psychiatric patients. These revealed the practical, visible effects of colonialism on its citizens.
So why does Black Skin, White Masks matter? Well, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks was one of the first texts to examine the damaging effects of colonial racism. Fanon's work is also noteworthy for the originality of its approach, which brought together very different schools of thought, including psychology, political theory, and literary criticism. We would call that cultural studies today.
Fanon turned to the aims and methods of different academic disciplines long before it became commonplace to do so. Fanon's strident, impassioned tone is also unusual for a work of academic scholarship. Black Skin, White Masks is not a dispassionate study of colonial racism. It is a call to arms that urges its black readers to take action against colonialism.
For 21st century readers like ourselves, the dehumanizing effects of racism may seem self-evident. Fanon's ideas may not seem worthy of special deliberation. But when he was writing his ideas, they were very controversial.
They contradicted the popular belief that colonialism was beneficial to the colonized. According to this argument, it was the duty of white people to eradicate the savage impulses of black people and to teach them civil behavior fanon instead asserted that colonialism was destructive preventing colonized individuals from developing a sense of self in making those claims black skin white mass laid the groundwork for new disciplines including post-colonial and human rights studies again his methodological approach of using multi-disciplines foretold the advent of cultural studies. Today, racism is discussed more openly. In addition, the public perception of racial inequality has shifted significantly since Fanon's day.
Nonetheless, his text remains important to the discussion of race relations. Particularly, his ideas help to illuminate the subtle ways in which racism can permeate culture. And despite the advances that have been made, racism still exists. Enduring emblems of racial segregation, like the Confederate flag in the U.S., A flag associated with the desire of the southern states to preserve the institution of slavery before the American Civil War still caused debate. There is still controversy over the insidious role racism plays in news coverage, in crime prevention, and government policy.
So in this way, Fanon's ideas are still required. I'm D. Elizabeth Glasgow. Thanks for watching.
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