38 pages • 1 hour read
Frantz FanonBlack Skin, White Masks
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 into a middle-class black family in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony, now a French département), where he studied under Aimé Césaire at the Lycée Schoelcher. He left Martinique at 18 to join the Free French army. After a brief return to Martinique he left for France again, and studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. Black Skin, White Masks was initially intended as his doctoral dissertation, but was rejected. Fanon lived in Algeria and Tunis, was active in the Algerian independence movement, and also served as the Provisional Algerian Government's Ambassador to Ghana. He died in 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland.
Fanon is both the author and the protagonist of Black Skin, White Masks, most notably in Chapter 5, "The Fact of Blackness." In this chapter, he moves through several stages, from complete innocence of racial difference, to an attempt to reason with irrational racism, to a defiant embrace of blackness and the "black soul," to a state of bereavement when he realizes that the Négritude movement and its celebration of blackness is only a "negative moment" within an historical dialectic. Fanon is also present as a character throughout the other chapters of the book, often sharing anecdotes gleaned from his psychiatric practice or during his years in France. Because of the personal and subjective style of the book, his voice comes through quite clearly: sometimes arch and ironic, sometimes impassioned and idealistic. The book ends on an optimistic note, with Fanon embracingthat Négritude is not an end in itself, and declaring his solidarity with all oppressed peoples and his belief in radical human freedom.
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was an Austrian psychotherapist and the founder of the school of individual psychology. Adler, who was one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, serves as a touchstone for Fanon's thought – in particular, his notions of the inferiority complex and overcompensation figure in Fanon's own analysis. This influence is most striking in Chapter 7, in which Fanon critiques Adler's conception of the inferiority complex.
G.W.F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German idealist philosopher whose thinking influenced Marx, the phenomenologists, the German existentialists, and early psychoanalysts (to name a few). One of his most famous concepts is that of the "master-slave dialectic," which appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Fanon argues in Chapter 7 that the relationship between French colonial masters and their former slaves does not yet fit the Hegelian model, and suggests that blacks must achieve full self-consciousness of the sort that Hegel describes in order to resolve their neuroses. Hegel's method of argument, known as "dialectic," is characterized by a process of conflict between two contradictory ideas that leads from less sophisticated to more sophisticated understanding of the subject under discussion. Chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks is heavily influenced by Hegelian dialectics.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher and public intellectual. His principal work, Being and Nothingness (1943) dealt with concepts such as authenticity, bad faith, and consciousness that clearly influenced Fanon's thinking. Most relevant to Black Skin, White Masks is the essay "Black Orpheus" (1948), which was published as a foreword to an anthology of black and Malagasy poetry. In that essay Sartre praised the Négritude movement for producing the revolutionary poetry of its time, but insisted that the proletariat was the only true historical agent. Fanon offers a complex response to Sartre in Chapter 5, both agreeing that perhaps Négritude will "pass over" into proletarian revolution and expressing a combination of grief and frustration in response to "Black Orpheus."
Mayotte Capécia
Mayotte Capécia is the pseudonym of Lucette Ceranus, author of the autobiographical novel Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), which Fanon uses as a case study in Chapter 2, "The Woman of Color and the White Man." He regards her book as "cut-rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption" (29), and as reflecting a deep self-hatred. In the novel, Capécia loves a white man, André, seemingly only because he is white. She would like to marry him and join his white world, but he invites her to a white social event just once, and she is rejected. He eventually leaves her to bring up their child alone.
René Maran
René Maran (1887-1960) was a black French Guyanese poet and novelist. Fanon uses Maran’s autobiographical novel Un homme pareil aux autres (1947) as a case study in Chapter 3, arguing that Maran is an abandonment-neurotic whose neurosis is best understood not as an individual, but as a social affliction. The novel concerns Maran's love for a white woman, Andrée. Although Maran and Andrée love one another mutually, Maran is plagued with doubts about the possibility of their relationship.
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Martinican writer, politician, and the father of the Négritude movement. His poems, plays, and polemical essays are among the key texts addressing the colonial condition. He was Fanon's teacher at school and continued to be a mentor to Fanon as an adult. Fanon quotes his poetry extensively in Black Skin, White Masks, and although he expresses his hope for universal humanism in Chapter 8, he never actually repudiates Césaire or his ideas – instead, he clearly finds Césaire's work a rich source of inspiration. Césaire's writing is ambitious and complex, and takes a positive stance toward African and diaspora history and achievements.
