- Length
- 232 pagesPhilcox, Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press, 2008
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Black Skin, White Masks
A psychiatrist's account of what a racist society does to the mind of the person it describes, written at twenty-seven and rejected as a thesis. Its chapter on being seen is the most quoted description of racialisation ever written.
- Date
- 1952
- Author
- Frantz Fanon
- Region
- Martinique, France and Algeria
- Language
- French
- 1967 English, Charles Lam Markmann Standard for forty years and criticised for softening the prose; in copyright Attested
- 2008 English, Richard Philcox The preferred version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 2 years
Refused as a dissertation, published to modest notice, and by the 1960s one of the most influential books written on race anywhere.
What the book says
A book about what colonialism does inside a person, written by a psychiatrist who had been through it. Fanon's subject is the colonised man who has absorbed the values of the coloniser and finds that they do not accept him - the Antillean who speaks perfect French, is educated in French schools to consider himself French, and discovers on arriving in France that he is not. The most famous chapter describes the discovery happening. A child on a train points and says look, a Negro, and Fanon reports what it is to be assembled from outside: not a self encountering others but an object among objects, given a body by someone else's gaze, sealed into a fact about his skin. Around this he examines language, sexual relations between colonised and coloniser, and the psychiatric literature - dismantling the psychologist who had diagnosed a dependency complex in the Malagasy, and arguing that what looks like an inferiority complex is not a pathology in the patient but an accurate perception of a situation. The last chapter refuses both a fixed Black identity and assimilation, and ends with a prayer to remain a man who questions.
What it argues
That racism is not a set of beliefs held by individuals but a structure that produces both parties, and that the colonised subject's condition cannot be treated as a private pathology. Fanon's method is to combine phenomenology with clinical observation: the man who is looked at is not simply insulted, he is given a body by the look, fixed as a physical fact where a white man is simply a person - and the resulting condition is a reasonable response to a real situation rather than a neurosis to be cured. From this comes the rejection of the psychiatric literature that pathologised the colonised. And from it comes his refusal of both available exits: assimilation, which requires becoming what the other is and being refused, and a fixed Black essence, which accepts the racial frame while reversing the sign.
What it answered
Négritude in Césaire's and Senghor's forms, Sartre's essay on it, and Mannoni's psychology of colonisation. Underneath is Hegel, whose account of recognition Fanon uses and then breaks: in the master-slave dialectic the master wants recognition from the slave, whereas the colonial master wants labour and does not want recognition at all - so the dialectic never turns, and the movement Hegel described cannot start.
How it argues
By moving between registers without warning - clinical case, literary analysis, autobiography, philosophical argument - and the shifts are the method. Fanon holds that the experience he is describing cannot be conveyed by any single mode, so a chapter may open with Hegel, quote a novel, and end in the first person. The book is unsystematic, occasionally contradicts itself, and is written with an urgency that has kept it alive; his own preface warns that anyone looking for a treatise should stop.
The moment
Fanon was born in Martinique, left at eighteen to fight with the Free French, was wounded and decorated, and discovered that the army which had accepted him did not regard him as French. He studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon, wrote this book there, and in 1953 took charge of a ward at Blida-Joinville in Algeria, where he treated both torturers and their victims. He joined the FLN, was expelled from Algeria, worked for the revolution from Tunis, and died of leukaemia in 1961 at thirty-six, weeks after finishing The Wretched of the Earth.
How it travelled
Slowly at first and then everywhere. The Wretched of the Earth, with Sartre's incendiary preface, made Fanon a revolutionary icon in the 1960s and overshadowed this book for two decades. Its own moment came later: from the 1980s it became central to postcolonial theory, critical race theory, film and literary studies, and psychoanalytic accounts of identity, and it is now the more read of the two in universities. The 2008 retranslation reflects that shift.
The strongest objection
That the account of women in the book is bad, and bad in a way the rest of the argument should have prevented. Fanon analyses the desire of Black men for white women with care and treats the parallel case for Black women with contempt, relying on a novel he takes as evidence and denying that he can know what a Black woman wants. Feminist critics from the 1980s onward have pointed out that the phenomenology of being fixed by another's gaze applies with obvious force to women and that Fanon does not apply it, and that his account of liberation assumes a masculine subject throughout. Defenders note the period and the author's age; the objection stands, and it matters more because the book's own method supplies the instrument it fails to use.
Why read it
The fifth chapter, on the lived experience of the Black man, which is the most powerful thing in this part of the section and can be read alone in half an hour. The whole book is short. Use the Philcox translation; the older English is measurably calmer than the French.
- First printed
- 1952
- First in English
- 1967
- Digitised
- No
Markmann's 1967 English was standard for forty years and is criticised for softening the prose; Richard Philcox's 2008 retranslation is now preferred. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is the later and more political book and is often read first.
Both English translations are in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and central. The account of the look, the analysis of the colonised psyche and the critique of essentialist identity are all working equipment in philosophy of race, and Fanon is among the most cited figures in the humanities.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and in both English translations, which differ substantially in tone. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How the two books relate - whether the later revolutionary Fanon supersedes this one or draws on it - is argued in every study of him. Whether his use of psychoanalysis is a commitment or an instrument is disputed. The treatment of women is a settled criticism rather than an open question. And the enormous range of positions claiming him, from armed struggle to identity politics to their critics, has made Fanon a figure whose name is often doing work his texts do not support.