The Cultural Politics of Emotion

In Chapter 3, Ahmed begins with an autobiographical excerpt from Frantz Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness in which a white child expresses fear of Fanon’s Blackness and claims that Fanon, whom he does not know, intends to eat him; the child flees for safety into his mother’s arms. Fanon’s language communicates his own feeling of being enclosed, penetrated, and distorted by the child’s fear. Ahmed comments that their mutual fear of one another functions to re-establish their separateness and produce difference during this moment of proximity. She points to the repetitive structure Fanon uses to list the stereotypes he reads in the child’s reaction to him and notes that this reflects the necessity for stereotypes to be repeated in order to “fix the meaning” of the other (Location 1493 of 6419). Such stereotypes also point to fear as another emotion that circulates in an affective economy. The child’s accusation that Fanon has cannibalistic intentions, Ahmed says, shows that fear functions by portraying the other as a threat that may consume the self. This is how fear becomes a justification for violence.

Fear is commonly distinguished from anxiety by the qualifier that fear has a specific object.