Fanon, phenomenology, race

Fanon, phenomenology, race

David macey

ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of Chapter 5 as ʻThe Fact of Blacknessʼ and not as ʻThe Lived Experience of the Black Man.ʼ [2] Indeed, the point of Fanonʼs exercise in sociodiagnostics is to demonstrate that there is no ʻfactʼ of blackness (or, by the same criterion, whiteness); both are a form of lived experience (expérience vécue; Erlebnis). To mistake a lived experience for a fact is to betray Fanonʼs text to such an extent as to make it almost incomprehensible.

The black man and the white man are not. And yet they are, and the reality of their being is Fanonʼs starting point: the black man trapped in his blackness, the white man in his whiteness, both trapped into their mutual and aggressive narcissism. [3] What, then, brings them or calls them into being, or sentences them to non-being? Writing of his childhood and emergence from it, Fanon remarks: ʻI am a negro [nègre], but naturally I donʼt know that because that is what I am.ʼ [4] I am going to use nègre in French because of the ambiguity of its political semantics and because there is no single English equivalent: it is distinct from both noir (black) and the more recent homme de couleur (man of colour) and covers the whole semantic field from ʻnegroʼ to ʻniggerʼ, the precise meaning being determined by context, the speakerʼs position or even the speakerʼs tone of voice.

Fanonʼs comment that he had to be told what he was is at one level a fairly banal example of the bracketing out of facticity in favour of simply being: at home, he remarks (meaning, presumably, in Martinique), the black man does not, has no need to, experience his being-for-others. [5] Judging by my own experience, it is, for example, perfectly possible to grow up in a uniquely white community in the north-east of England without knowing in any real sense that you are white. There is no need to know that, and it is well known that fish have no sense of wetness. I am not suggesting that there is some equivalence between a white childhood in the northeast and a black childhood in Martinique, merely that we may have to be told who and what we are, that we may not know it ʻnaturallyʼ. Perhaps being-for-others is, in ethnicity as in other domains, a precondition for self-knowledge. Fanonʼs sense of not knowing what he is because that is what he is, is to a large degree an effect of his being Martinican, and there is considerable textual evidence to indicate that Peau noire could not have been written by anyone but a Martinican. [6] It is deeply rooted in the Martinican experience, in the experience of people who were French citizens and not colonial subjects, and who occupied a curious position within the racial hierarchy. One of the islandʼs more peculiar exports was the French-educated black civil servant and citizen who ʻadministeredʼ black subjects in the African colonies, and who was in a sense neither black nor white. Fanon found himself in that anomalous position as a young soldier at the end of the Second World War: he was neither indigène nor toubab, neither ʻnativeʼ nor ʻwhite manʼ. Fanonʼs ʻblack manʼ is Martinican, or in other words a ʻWest Indian who does not think of himself as black; he thinks of himself as West Indian. Subjectively, intellectually, the West Indian behaves as a White. But he is a nègre. He will notice that once he is in Europe, and when they talk about nègres, he will know that they are talking about him as well as about the Senegalese.ʼ [7] Talking about the nègre is one way of calling him into being and of giving him a position akin to that of other marginal groups. One recalls Adornoʼs lapidary remark in Minima Moralia: ʻAnti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.ʼ [8] And one recalls the advice given to a very young Fanon by his philosophy teacher in Martinique: ʻWhen you hear them talking about the Jews, prick up your ears. Theyʼre talking about you.ʼ [9] One of the agencies that lets Fanon know he is a nègre by talking about him is of course that child who, one cold day in Lyon, fixes him with its white gaze, thus reducing him to a state of complete being-forothers. The child does not in fact speak to Fanon or tell him anything. The child turns to its mother and says ʻTiens, un nègreʼ (ʻLook, a nègreʼ). [10] The form of the utterance is structurally similar to the ʻsmutʼ described by Freud in that it requires the co-presence of three parties: ʻIn addition to the one who makes the joke … a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggression, and a third in whom the jokeʼs aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.ʼ [11] For the mother, the final yield of this exchange is embarrassment rather than pleasure, but verbal (and perhaps sexual) hostility or aggression is certainly involved.

Why a nègre

?

Before going on to examine Fanonʼs description of this encounter and to ask why he analyses it in phenomenological term, it seems appropriate to look more closely at the question of why the child in fact sees a nègre and not a man with a scar on his face, or a man with the build of the footballer that Fanon was. How does the child know who and what it is seeing? One might also ask why the child sees a nègre and not a noir or a homme de couleur. What pre-understanding, what stock of knowledge to hand, is in play here? These questions are in a sense posed by Fanon when he administers word-association tests – which he wrongly describes as an exercise in free association – to white friends and colleagues and comes up with a rich crop of stereotypes. But whilst he collates his informantsʼ associations, he does not ask why the child knows he is a nègre. Where do racist ideas come from? Part of the answer may come from a geography textbook published in 1903 and cited in a recent study of racial stereotyping in France:

Paul is usually a very punctual pupil. But one day he is late for school. ʻIʼm sorry, sirʼ, he says, ʻI didnʼt realize what time it was. I was watching a nègre on the GrandʼPlace.ʼ ʻWas he a real nègre

Yes! Yes, sir. A real nègre with all black skin and teeth as white as milk. They say he comes from Africa. Are there lots of nègres in that country?ʼ

ʻYes, my friend.ʼ [12]

The authority of the textbook confirms the doxa of ʻthey sayʼ, of the rumour about the nègre. It also confirms that Fanon is, in the eyes of white France, precisely what he is not in his own eyes: a nègre from the Africa that Martinicans of his generation had been taught to despise because they were French. As Fanon remarks in 1953, it was only when Aimé Césaire began to speak of negritude that is became possible for a few Martinicans to learn that ʻit is well and good to be a nègre[13]

Freudʼs study of jokes anticipates the three-party structure of Fanonʼs encounter with the child and its mother; a second theorist of humour supplies another element. In 1899, Henri Bergson – not, I think, a philosopher one would usually regard as racist – asks quite straightforwardly, indeed innocently: ʻWhy do we laugh at a nègre?ʼ He then answers his own rhetorical question by recounting the anecdote about the Parisian coachman who turned to his black passenger and called him ʻmal lavéʼ – not properly washed. We laugh, explains Bergson, because the nègre is a white man in disguise, because he has put on a mask: coloration may well be inherent in the skin but we regard it is as something that has been put on artificially, because it surprises us. [14] The nègre is a figure of fun, not because his white masks conceal a black skin, but because his black skin is a disguise. Tiens, un nègre.

We know nothing of the life history of the child who saw Fanon that cold day. We do know something of that of a girl nine years older than Fanon, Françoise Marrette, who would become Françoise Dolto, psychoanalytic grandmother to the nation. She was eight at the time. And her experience may teach us something about the stock of knowledge that makes a child so familiar with the paradigm: ʻLook, a nègre.… Look at the nègre, Mum. Iʼm frightened.ʼ [15] On the beach at Deauville during the First World War, Françoise Marrette saw a black family; her nanny laughed at the sight. Doltoʼs childish correspondence, preserved and published for God alone knows what reason, is, for a while, full of conflicting images of black people, and they all originate in the meeting on the beach and in an encounter with a wounded tirailleur sénégalais (a Black colonial infantryman) who was being cared for by her mother. Perhaps the young Françoise did say ʻTiens, un nègre.ʼ The soldier kissed the little girl because she reminded him of his own daughter. The nannyʼs reaction was to wash her vigorously: being mal lavé is obviously a contagious condition that might be passed on to a child. There follows an exchange of letters with her uncle, who warns her not to play with the black troops she meets on the beach: they are handsome, but not as good as ʻourʼ mountain troops. From London, her father sends her a comic postcard of ʻfour little nègresʼ – I assume them to be a group of street minstrels. In a letter, Françoise summarizes the school composition she wrote about a bayonet charge: it features a tirailleur called Sid Vava Ben Abdal-lah: ʻVavaʼ was the childʼs nickname, and she clearly identifies with her infantryman, whom she describes as having a black face, white teeth, a flat nose and a red turban. Finally, her mother sends her a postcard of a tirailleur smoking a cigarette. On the back she has written: ʻHere is Bou ji maʼs portrait. Are you frightened of him?ʼ [16] After that, there are no more mentions of black people in Doltoʼs letters. Small wonder that a child in Lyon could move so quickly from surprise to fear. Small wonder that he or she knows she has seen a nègre, knows how to recognize one, and knows why she should be afraid of him. To say, ʻTiens, un nègreʼ is an act of recognition, not of cognition.

To digress for a moment. It is significant that Doltoʼs experience centred on a tirailleur sénégalais. The colonial regiments recruited in Africa were surrounded by a particular aura. On the one hand, they were highly regarded as fighting men; on the other, they had a nasty reputation for rape and pillage – and were, apparently, encouraged in those practices by their white officers. When they were stationed in the French-occupied Rhineland after the First World War, their unenviable reputation spread to England. The Daily Herald, of all papers, ran headlines like ʻBlack Peril on the Rhineʼ, ʻSexual Horrors Let Loose by Franceʼ, ʻBlack Menace of 40,000 Troopsʼ and ʻAppeal to the Women of Europeʼ. [17] During the First World War, the image of the tirailleur sénégalais became still more ambiguous when it was used to sell Banania, a breakfast drink made from banana flour, cocoa and sugar. [18] All over France, posters showed a grinning soldier dressed in his exotic uniform, and spooning Banania into his mouth. The image of fear merges with one of cosy domesticity, as in the image of the wolf-granny in Little Red Riding Hood. Anyone with a taste for racist kitsch might like to know that shops in Paris now sell whole breakfast sets in bright yellow porcelain that reproduce the original Banania poster. I donʼt know if Banania was part of Fanonʼs childhood, or even if it was sold in Martinique, but he certainly knew about the tirailleurs. When a sénégalais unit stopped in Martinique in transit from French Guiana, his father brought them home. The family was ʻdelighted with themʼ. [19] The Fanon family behaved in much the same way as the Marrette family: they were hospitable to their ʻcolonial boysʼ, recognized them as nègres and misrecognized themselves. Residence in France would put Fanon right on that score.

Lived experience

To turn from the seer to the seen. Fanon is not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist, and he is a very selective one, not least because he had little philosophical training and was self-taught. He makes little use of the concept of situation, of the founding moment of the cogito, or of themes like being-with-others, and concentrates almost exclusively on his being-for-others. Fanonʼs account of his lived experience, his Erlebnis, his ʻact of consciousnessʼ, in Merleau-Pontyʼs phrase, [20] obviously draws heavily on the well-known passage in Part III of LʼEtre et le néant (1943) in which Sartre describes the intersubjective structure of the gaze and the shame it induces. ʻShameʼ, writes Sartre, ʻis a non-positional consciousness of the self as shame and, as such, it is an example of what the Germans call “Erlebnis”. What is more, its structure is intentional; it is a shameful apprehension of something and that something in me. I am ashamed of what I am[21] Sartreʼs shame is occasioned because he had been seen making a clumsy or vulgar gesture. That is not the case with Fanon, who has done nothing, said nothing. Unlike Jean Genet, he has not been caught or seen in the act of stealing. [22] He is simple there as an object of the gaze. Nausea floods in as Fanon apprehends what he is for the other: he is that, the grinning tirailleur advertising Banania, and a close relative of Bamboulette, the housemaid from Martinique who advertised shoe polish (and yes, it was black polish). [23] The same effect can be achieved through language: to speak to the black man in petit nègre, which is the singularly demeaning French equivalent to pidgin English, and to expect him to reply in kind, is ʻto attach him to his image, to lime him, to imprison him, to make him the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance (apparaitre) for which he is not responsible.ʼ [24] That appearance is the creation of others, the creation of school textbooks, philosophers and all those who teach children to know a nègre when they see one.

Had Fanon been a psychoanalyst – and he was not, whatever he may say – he might have described his Erlebnis, his negative epiphany, in terms of the infliction of a narcissistic wound or a symbolic castration. Borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, he actually describes it in terms of the destruction of his corporeal schema, described by the philosopher as ʻa résumé of our bodily experienceʼ and as ʻa way of expressing the fact that my body is in the world.ʼ [25] It is a kind of dialectic between the body and the world. Fanon in fact does more than borrow from Merleau-Ponty; he goes back to the philosopherʼs sources, quoting at some length from Jean Lhermitteʼs somewhat obscure LʼImage de notre corps, in which the corporeal schema is described as an idea of the spatio-temporal existence of the body, and as a necessary precondition for any action in or on the world. [26] A clearer image of what Fanon himself understands by a corporeal schema emerges from his description of the Algerian women who, during the war of independence, took off their traditional veils, adopted European dress and planted bombs: ʻThe absence of the veil alters the Algerian womanʼs corporeal schema. She has to rapidly invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create a woman-outside-without-a veil way of walking.ʼ [27] What is at stake is a very physical, fleshy – as the later Merleau-Ponty would put it – mode of being in the world. In the encounter with the child, it is the personal schema that Fanon has built up, the schema of an ego that exists in the spatio-temporal world that is under attack, together with the historico-racial schema he has constructed. It gives way to an epidermal-racial schema, as Fanon – Fanonʼs body – is taken over by a host of stereotypes. [28] Fanon experiences not only alienation, but obliteration and even incineration: ʻAll this whiteness burns me to ashes.ʼ [29] I will return to the possible significance of the image of burning.

Just why Fanon chooses to analyse his Erlebnis in Sartrean and Merleau-Pontyean terms is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. After all, neither La Phénoménologie de la perception nor LʼEtre et le néant is a treatise on racism and anti-racism. And Fanon did not read them as such; he quite rightly reads LʼEtre et le néant as ʻan analysis of bad faith and inauthenticityʼ. [30] The whole of Peau noire might be described as an attempt to answer the question: is black authenticity possible in a white world? Bad faith and inauthenticity are the main themes he discovers in his readings of a group of books dealing with the woman of colour and the white man, and the woman of colour and the black man: Mayotte Capéciaʼs Je suis Martiniquaise (1948) and La Négresse blanche (1950), Réné Maranʼs Un Homme pareil aux autres (1947), and Abdoulaye Sadjiʼs Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal (1951). The contrast between how the Senegalese novelist and the Martinican psychiatrist deal with the mulatto woman is telling. For Sadji, the life of Nini, like that of all mulattoes, is a lie, but it is a lie forced upon by her destiny and even by her name (Virginie, abbreviated to ʻNiniʼ: ni … ni, ʻneither, norʼ);31 for Fanon, Mayotte Capéciaʼs problems (and Niniʼs) stem from her inability to assume her facticity, from the bad faith of her repeated ʻI know, but…ʼ: ʻI wanted to get married, but I wanted to marry a white man. The trouble is that a woman of colour is never quite respectable in the eyes of a white man. Even if he loves her, and I knew that … I knew that white men do not marry black women.ʼ [32] ʻI know, but…ʼ is the classic structure of bad faith. Whilst Fanon is certainly a masculinist writer, I suggest that the harshness of his condemnation of Capécia is not, as has been suggested, [33] evidence of misogyny, but of a condemnation (and perhaps fear) of situational bad faith.

The question ʻwhy phenomenology?ʼ is hard to answer, mainly because we do not have any documentary evidence: there are no preparatory materials or drafts, no correspondence, and no helpfully revealing diaries or notebooks. We know relatively little of what Fanon had read, or of when he read it. We have only the evidence of the text itself. And the text suggests that Fanon turns to phenomenology after a process of elimination. Of the theoretical discourses available to him, it is, apparently, the most suitable for his purposes. Part of the appeal is obviously phenomenologyʼs concentration on experience and immediacy. As written by Merleau-Ponty (ʻI reach for the ashtrayʼ) and Sartre (ʻI see my friend Pierreʼ), it is also philosophy in the first person; no other philosophy would have allowed Fanon to say ʻIʼ with quite such vehemence. What were the alternatives? The Marxism of the day, and particularly that of the Parti Communiste Français, would have had little to offer except banalities about the colonial question, and probably a brusque reminder that Martinique was not a colony but an integral part of the universalist French Republic. Hegelʼs dialectic of master and slave ignores the reality of the cane fields; the plantation-owner wants work from his slave, not recognition, and when Fanon comments that ʻstruggleʼ is the only answer to the plantation workers of Martinique, he does not mean the struggle for pure prestige. [34]

The real in sight

The psychiatry Fanon had studied had taught him about the ʻprimitive mentalityʼ of blacks and North Africans, and his writing career begins and ends with its critique. [35] Adlerʼs individual psychology might be able to explain the inferiority complex of an individual Martinican, but not the inferiorization of an entire population. Mannoniʼs ʻdependency complexʼ seeks to prove that colonialism is impossible unless it is desired by the colonized, and fails signally to see that, when 100,000 people have been shot dead after the Madagascan insurrection of 1947, the Lebel rifle in the hands of a soldier that appears in a dream is unlikely to be a symbolic penis, or phallus (as you will). Whatever the properties of the symbolic phallus may be, it is not normally a weapon of mass destruction. Jung has nothing to say to black youth. As Fanon remarks, ʻNeither Freud, nor Adler, nor even the cosmic Jung were thinking about blacks in the course of their research.ʼ [36] Without going into any great detail or any extended discussion of the claim that there are no Oedipal neurotics (and no homosexuals … only there are) in Martinique, it has to be said that Fanonʼs relationship with psychoanalysis is fraught. [37] He does state that an analysis of the black manʼs Erlebnis requires a psychoanalytic input, but he also argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular is culture-bound and has nothing to say about his experience.

Virtually every mention of psychoanalysis is hedged with the reservation ʻYes, but…ʼ Discussing Mannoniʼs book on Madagascar, [38] he comments with deceptive mildness: ʻWe must not lose sight of the real.ʼ [39] Fanon is not concerned with symbolic wounds, but with the absolute wound of colonialism. [40] ʻAlongside phylogenesis and ontogenesis, there is sociogenesis.ʼ [41] The insistence that psychoanalysis loses sight of the real, and the stress on the need to keep it in sight, may explain Fanonʼs quite extraordinary misreading of Freud. He rarely quotes Freud, and when he does so he claims that Freud proves that neuroses originate in a determinate Erlebnis. He takes his supporting evidence from the ʻFive Lectures on Psychoanalysisʼ of 1909. Unfortunately for Fanonʼs argument, Freud is in fact describing how he came to reject the so-called seduction theory which did trace the aetiology of neurosis to an actual sexual trauma. [42] The misreading is the result of keeping the real in sight, the ʻrealʼ being the absolute wound.

Hegel and Freud do not think about blacks, and nor was Sartre thinking about blacks when he wrote LʼEtre et le néant, but Fanon was not the only black writer of his generation to conclude that Sartrean phenomenology could be an aid to his analysis of his lived experience. In his paper on ʻThe Negro Writer and his Worldʼ, presented in 1956 to Présence Africaineʼs First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, George Lamming remarks that ʻthe Negro is not simply there. He is there in a certain way.… The Negro is a man whom the Other (meaning the non-Negro) regards as a Negro.ʼ [43] Although Lamming gives no reference, this is an obvious allusion to Sartreʼs Réflexions sur la question juive: ʻThe Jew is a man whom other men regard as a Jew.… It is the antisemite who makes the Jew.ʼ [44] Fanon cites this text too, but immediately spells out its limitations: he is not the victim of someone elseʼs ʻideaʼ of him. He is the victim of his own appearance (apparaître), of the black skin on to which white fantasies and fears are projected. [45] Sartrean phenomenology can help Fanon analyse the mode of his being-for-others, but it too lets him down. Sartre lets him down in his preface to Senghorʼs anthology of the poetry of negritude, where he assumes that negritude is a temporary phenomenon that will disappear when it is subsumed into some quasi-Hegelian universalist synthesis. [46] Fanon was dubious about negritude – that ʻgreat black mirageʼ [47] – but he could also invoke it to finesse Sartre by remarking ʻIt is the white man who creates the nègre. But it is the nègre who created negritude.ʼ [48] At other times, Fanon does assume the stance of negritude, does exploit Spivakʼs moment of strategic essentialism – and negritude is certainly an essentialism. This is how the encounter in Lyon ends: The mother: ʻ“Look, heʼs handsome, this nègre”… Fanon: “The handsome negro says bugger you, madame.” Shame flooded across her face. Two birds with one stone. I identified my enemies and I created a scene.ʼ [49] The same defiance reappears later: ʻYou come to terms with me, Iʼm not coming to terms with anyone.ʼ [50] Although Fanon does not flag it as such, this is a quotation from the great poem of negritude, Césaireʼs Cahier dʼun retour au pays natal. [51] It may be a mirage, but negritude has its strategic uses.The irony is that, when he ʻabolishesʼ negritude with his vision of a future world without class, without race, Sartre falls into the very trap that he denounces in Réflexions sur la question juive, where he mocks the ʻDemocratʼ who can recognize the Jew as Man, but not as the creator and bearer of Jewishness, just as the ʻhumanistsʼ of La Nausée love an abstract universal man so much that they have no interest in concrete individuals. Sartreʼs little problem may go some way to explaining why so much of the French left was lukewarm about supporting the Algerian cause and, ultimately, to explaining why certain French intellectuals appear to be convinced that the presence in a French classroom of a girl in an Islamic headscarf (hijab) puts the entire Republic in danger. But I will leave that, and the question of why some erstwhile Third Worldists appear to be mutating into Islamophobes, for another occasion.

The gaze that burns

The theme of the threatening white gaze and the trope of visibility/invisibility are, of course, not uncommon in black writing. Almost at random, one thinks of Du Boisʼs veil of invisibility, of Ellisonʼs invisible man, or, more recently, of bell hooks in Wounds of Passion: ʻThe gaze of white folks disturbs me. It is always for me the would-be colonizing look.ʼ [52] One of the reasons why Fanon is so critical of psychoanalysis is that, ʻAs the racial drama unfolds in the open air, the black man does not have time to “unconsciousnessize” itʼ (inconscienciser). [53] I suggest that there might be something very specific to Fanonʼs experience of the gaze and use of figures of visibility, and that it might pertain to Martinique. In Aimé Césaireʼs reworking of The Tempest, it is Prosperoʼs gaze that forces Caliban to see himself as he is seen: ʻYou have finally imposed upon me an image of myself. An underdeveloped man, as you put it, an under-capable man. That is how you have made me see myself.ʼ [54] Tiens, un nègre. And there is a Martinican saying: ʻZié Békés brilé zié Nègʼ (ʻthe eyes of the béké burned the eyes of the black manʼ). [55] The béké is not just any white man; he is the white creole, the descendent of locally born plantation owners. The béké is Martiniqueʼs answer to The Man, Mr Charlie. It is through the internalization of his gaze that the Nèg (this is the Creole for nègre) has been blinded. And it is the white gaze that burns Fanon to ashes. To speculate, which is all we can really do here: when Fanon is gazed at by that child, he is experiencing anew a traumatic moment in Martinican history and in the Martinican imaginary: he is being looked at by the béké and his eyes are burning. Is this why the schema of the gaze is not reversible, as it is for Sartre? Is this why Fanon can put up no ontological resistance, cannot look back? Speaking of Madagascar, Fanon described colonization as an absolute wound. In the case of Martinique, the wound was more absolute still, so absolute that it cannot be staunched. In a strange way, it was a settler colony, or rather a settled colony. The aboriginal population having been exterminated, it was repopulated with slaves whose eyes were burned by the békéʼs gaze. Martinique has no pre-colonial history: it all began with the absolute wound and the eyes that were burned.

I have said very little here about Algeria, and nothing about Fanon and Algeria. To conclude, let me mention the name of Algeria but only to point out that while we are discussing philosophy and race, people will die in Algeria and that they will die ugly deaths. I do not say this in order to trivialize such discussions – the issues involved are as serious as your life. People will die, and the survivors will live with their deaths for a long time to come. Imagine what happens to the young women who are kidnapped by so-called Armed Islamic Groups for equally so-called marriages of pleasure. They are gang-raped for days or weeks and then killed, often by being disembowelled. Imagine what happens in the cellars used by the military and the police, where the interrogatorʼs tool of choice is a blow lamp. Imagine what will become of the eightyear-old child who sees her teacher having her throat cut before she is decapitated in front of the class, and who stares at the severed head left on the desk. Remember the wretched of the earth, and the dead of Algeria. For the moment, it is all that we can do. Their lives have been taken. Do not let their memory die, even if we do not know their names. Remember them. Remember.

Notes

1. ^ Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, Collection Points, Seuil, Paris, 1975, p. 187.

2. ^ Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann,

Grove Press, New York, 1967.

3. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 7.

4. ^ Ibid., p. 155.

5. ^ Ibid., p. 89.

6. ^ To take only one example; Fanon uses the expression souventefois (ibid., p. 73), which to a French reader looks like either a misprint or an odd condensation of souvent and mainte fois. It is quite simply the Martinican–Guadeloupean Creole form of souvent (often).

7. ^ Ibid., p. 120.

8. ^ T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott,

Verso, London, 1978, p. 110.

9. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 98.

10. ^ Ibid., p. 90.

11. ^ Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Pelican Freud Library, Vol. VI, Penguin,

Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 143.

12. ^ Cited in Alain Ruscio, Le Credo de lʼhomme blanc, Editions Complexe, Brussels, 1995, p. 256.

13. ^ Frantz Fanon, ʻAntillais et Africainsʼ, in Pour la Révolution africaine, Maspéro, Paris, 1969, p. 26.

14. ^ Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, PUF, Paris, 1969, pp. 31–2.

15. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 90.

16. ^ Françoise Dolto, Correspondence I 1913–1938, edited by Colette Percheminier, Hatier, Paris, 1991, pp. 44, 45, 53, 58–59, 64.

17. ^ Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, Pluto Press,

London, 1985, p. 74.

18. ^ On the iconography of the advertisements for Banania, see Jan Nederven Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995, pp. 162–3.

19. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 132n.

20. ^ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, Gallimard, Paris, 1945, p. 466.

21. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, LʼEtre et le néant, Collection Tel, Gallimard, Paris, 1972, p. 265.

22. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint-Genet: Comédien et martyr, Gallimard, Paris, 1952, p. 23.

23. ^ Pieterse, White on Black, p. 161.

24. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 27.

25. ^ Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 114, 117.

26. ^ Jean Lhermitte, LʼImage de notre corps, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, Paris, 1939, p. 11.

27. ^ Frantz Fanon, Sociologie dʼune révolution, Maspéro,

Paris, 1968, p. 42.

28. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, pp. 89–90.

29. ^ Ibid., p. 92.

30. ^ Ibid., p. 33.

31. ^ Abdoulaye Sadji, Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal, Présence Africaine, Paris, 1988, pp. 177–8.

32. ^ Mayotte Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise, Editions Corréa, Paris, 1948, pp. 202, 131.

33. ^ See, for instance, Gwen Bergner, ʻWho is that Masked Woman? Or, The Role of Gender in Fanonʼs Black Skin, White Masksʼ, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 110, no. 1, January 1995.

34. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, pp. 179 n. [2] , 181.

35. ^ ʻLe Syndrôme Nord-africainʼ (1952) in Pour la Révolution africaine; ʻGuerre coloniale et troubles mentauxʼ in Les Damnés de la terre, Maspéro, Paris, 1961.

36. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 123.

37. ^ David Macey, ʻThe Recall of the Real: Frantz Fanon and Psychoanalysisʼ, Constellations, vol. 6, no. 1, 1999.

38. ^ Octave Mannoni, Prospéro et Caliban: Psychologie de la colonisation, Editions Universitaires, Paris, 1984 (first published as Psychologie de la colonisation in 1950).

39. ^ Ibid., p. 67.

40. ^ Ibid., p. 78.

41. ^ Ibid., p. 8.

42. ^ Sigmund Freud, ʻFive Lectures on Psychoanalysisʼ, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 11, Hogarth, London, p. 14; Fanon, Peau noire, p. 117.

43. ^ Lamming, p. 321.

44. ^ Réflexions sur la question juive, pp. 83–4.

45. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 93.

46. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, ʻOrphée noirʼ, in Lépold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, PUF, Paris, 1948.

47. ^ Fanon, ʻAntillais et Africainsʼ, p. 31.

48. ^ Fanon, Sociologie dʼune révolution, p. 29.

49. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 92.

50. ^ Ibid., p. 106.

51. ^ Aimé Césaire, Cahier dʼun retour au pays natal, in Poésies, Seuil, 1994, Paris, p. 31.

52. ^ bell hooks, Wounds of Passion, Womenʼs Press, London, 1998, p. 54.

53. ^ Fanon, Peau noire, p. 122.

54. ^ Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, Seuil, Paris, 1969, p. 83.

55. ^ Francis Affergan, Anthropologie à la Martinique, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,

Paris, 1983, p. 177.