Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is a psychological study of colonialism. According to Fanon, the encounter between white European colonizers and black slaves and their descendants creates a unique social and psychological situation with a characteristic set of psychopathologies. Black Skin, White Masks analyzes these psychopathologies, traces their roots in the colonial encounter, and suggests how healing might become possible.

Fanon works within a broadly existentialist and phenomenological framework, his project is psychoanalytic, and he is sympathetic to the Négritude movement. However, his way of thinking is not reducible to any of these schools of thought, or even to their sum; as he proceeds in his analysis, Fanon engages dialectically with each, revealing ways in which they fall short of comprehending the black experience and transforming them in order to theorize black experience and black psychology. When Fanon writes, “asdoomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him” (2), he is both describing an aspect of lived black experience and giving an indication of the basic trajectory of his book. Black Skin, White Masks can be thought of as a series of confrontations between the black subject seeking to theorize his condition and a set of ideas and tools that he eventually overcomes and discards or modifies to suit his purpose, with the ultimate goal of resolving (or rejecting) the contradiction within him.