Fanon's biography
Where was Fanon born?
What does Fanon say about the role of language in the process of colonization?
•Inferiority complex of the colonized in relation to the superiority of the colonizer’s language
•Language as a field of reference
What does Fanon identify as the difference between anti-semitism and anti-black racism?
•Superiority vs inferiority
When was Wretched of the Earth published?
Shortly before Fanon's death in 1961
What was Fanon's profession?
He worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
What does Fanon say about relations between black men and white women?
•Inferiority complex becomes applied to desire/love
•”Quest for white flesh” as a vehicle for ethical/moral purity and innocence
•Devaluation of self
"It is this tripod-the anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise, and the devaluation of self that flows out of it-that supports the whole symptomatology of this neurosis.” (BSWM, 1971, p.73)
What is the negritude movement?
A post-colonial movement to try to produce black or afro-centric works of art, culture, and literature, associated with Fanon's former teacher and mentor, Aime Cesaire
A practical handbook on bringing about revolutionary change
The book was going to be his doctoral dissertation
What does Fanon say about the relations between women of colour and white men?
•Whiteness as a vehicle for socio-political movement
•People of color and passing
“For, in a word, the race must be whitened; every woman in Martininque knows this, say it, repeats it. Whiten the race, save the race” (BSWM, p.47)
What are Fanon's feelings about the idea of reparations?
Not a fan because it ties people to a past
Probably the most famous phrase of Wretched of the Earth is Fanon's contention that “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”. Why does he make this claim?
Because colonialism is always violent
Who did he treat in the hospital?
He treated both the French Algerian revolutionaries who were being tortured and the French soldiers responsible for doing the torturing
What did the child say to Fanon?
•"Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! (BSWM, 1971, p.112)
What is Fanon's critique of Marx and psychoanalysts like Mannoni?
They do not adequately address the question of race
Why, in Wretched of the Earth, does Fanon break with Aime Cesaire and the negritude movement?
Because of their focus on cultural and literature texts
For France
In Fanon's analysis, what replaces the bodily schema?
The racial-epidermal schema
The corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema…I was responsible at the same time for my body, for
my race, for my ancestors…I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects,
slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "Sho’ good eatin’.”…All I wanted was to be a man among other men.” (BSWM, 1971, p.112)
What is meant by the last phrase of Black Skin White Mask "“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” ?
•Subjectivity in the interrogative
Can you describe any of the case studies found at the end of Wretched of the Earth?
European police inspector who after participating in violent interrogations (torture) during the Algerian war, begins to beat his wife and children, including hitting “the baby of twenty months, with unaccustomed savagery” (Fanon, 1963, p.268).