“Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon

Abstract

Black Skin, White Masks, by the experimental psychiatrist and anti-colonial militant Franz Fanon, is regarded as a seminal text in the fields of postcolonial theory and critical race studies. Yet it has also been deeply influential on – and indeed can be considered a precursor of – psychosocial studies, in that at its core is a sociogenic theory of mental illness: for Fanon, it is never merely the individual who is ill, but the society of which they are a part. Fanon draws on a mixture of psychoanalysis and phenomenology to analyze the impacts on the black psyche of a racist colonial society. This chapter will provide a commentary on the origins of this book in Fanon’s Martinican childhood, psychiatric training in France, and reading of phenomenology and Sartre, before outlining its key concepts and ideas and the challenge they pose to several European philosophical and theoretical frameworks. The chapter will close by briefly outlining the renewed relevance of Black Skin, White Masks against the backdrop of the recent international Black Lives Matter protests, as well as attempts within academia to “decolonize the curriculum.”