Frantz Fanon’s ’Black Skin, White Masks’: New Interdisciplinary Essays

197 Pages·2013·1.651 MB·English

by  Max Silverman, (Ed.)

TEXTS•IN•CULTURE F TEXTS•IN•CULTURE
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First published in 1952, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White t
z
Masks is one of the most important anti-colonial works
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of the post-war period. It is both a profound critique of a
the conscious and unconscious ways in which n Frantz Fanon’s
colonialism brutalises the colonised, and a passionate o
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cry from deep within a black body alienated by the
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s
colonial system and in search of liberation from it.
BLACK SKIN
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This volume is the first collection of essays specifically L
devoted to Fanon’s text. It offers a wide range of A
interpretations of the text by leading scholars in a C WHITE MASKS
number of disciplines. Chapters deal with Fanon’s K
Martinican heritage, Fanon and Creolism, ideas of race,
S
racism and new humanism, Fanon and Sartre, K New interdisciplinary essays
representations of Blacks and Jews, and the I
N
psychoanalysis of race, gender and violence.

Contributors offer new ways of reading the text and the W
volume as a whole is an important contribution to the
H
growing field of Fanon studies.
I
T
This book will be essential reading for students and
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researchers in the areas of postcolonial studies, French

and Francophone studies, cultural studies, ethnic and M
racial studies, politics, literature and psychoanalysis, A
and all those concerned, like Fanon, with the quest for S
human freedom. K
S

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies S
i
at the University of Leeds lv
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m
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edited by Max Silverman
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
9780719064494 cvr.indd 1 10/12/2012 16:59:25
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Reflections on the Revolution in France
series editors
Jeff Wallace and John Whale
founding editors
Stephen Copley and Jeff Wallace
advisory editors
Lynda Nead, Birbeck College, London
Gillian Beer, Girton College, Cambridge
Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
Anne Janowitz, University of Warwick
This series offers specially commissioned, cross-disciplinary
essays on texts of seminal importance to Western culture.
Each text has had an impact on the way we think, write and
live beyond the confines of its original discipline, and it is
only through an understanding of its multiple meanings that
we can fully appreciate its importance.
already published
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species
David Amigoni, Jeff Wallace (eds)
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Stephen Copley, Kathryn Sutherland (eds)
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Martin Coyle (ed.)
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Ruth Evans (ed.)
Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
Laura Marcus (ed.)
Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis
Bronwen Price (ed.)
The Great Exhibition of 1851
Louise Purbrick (ed.)
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
John Whale (ed.)
Edmund Burke’s
Frantz Fanon’s
,
BLACK SKIN WHITE MASKS
New interdisciplinary essays
MAX SILVERMAN
editor
Manchester University Press
Manchester
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2005
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,
copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978 0 7190 6449 4 paperback
First published by Manchester University Press in hardback 2005
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or
third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content
on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Series introduction page vii
Preface ix
Chronology x
max silverman
Introduction 1
david macey
1 Adieu foulard. Adieu madras 12
françoise vergès
2 Where to begin? ‘Le commencement’ in Peau noire,
masques blancs and in creolisation 32
jim house
3 Colonial racisms in the ‘métropole’: reading Peau noire,
masques blancs in context 46
bryan cheyette
4 Frantz Fanon and the Black-Jewish imaginary 74
robert bernasconi
5 The European knows and does not know:
Fanon’s response to Sartre 100
max silverman
6 Reflections on the human question 112
vicky lebeau
7 Children of violence 128
david marriott
8 En moi: Frantz Fanon and René Maran 146
Notes on contributors 180
Index 183
vi Series introduction
Series introduction vii
Series introduction
Texts are produced in particular cultures and in particular historical
circumstances. In turn, they shape and are shaped by those cultures as
they are read and re-read in changing circumstances by different groups
with different commitments, engagements and interests. Such readings
are themselves then re-absorbed into the ideological frameworks within
which the cultures develop. The seminal works drawn on by cultures thus
have multiple existences within them, exerting their influence in distinct
and perhaps contradictory ways. As these texts have been ‘claimed’ by
particular academic disciplines, however, their larger cultural significance
has often been obscured.
Recent work in cultural history and textual theory has stimulated
critical awareness of the complex relations between texts and cultures,
highlighting the limits of current academic formations and opening the
possibility of new approaches to interdisciplinarity. At the same time,
however, the difficulties of interdisciplinary work have become increas-
ingly apparent at all levels of research and teaching. On the one hand the
abandonment of disciplinary specialisms may lead to amorphousness
rather than challenging interdisciplinarity; on the other, interdisciplinary
approaches may in the end simply create new specialisms or sub-
specialisms, with their own well-guarded boundaries. In these circum-
stances, yesterday’s ground-breaking interdisciplinary study may
become today’s autonomous (and so potentially circumscribed) discipline,
as has happened, it might be argued, in the case of some forms of History
of Ideas.
The volumes in this series highlight the advantages of interdisci-
plinary work while at the same time encouraging a critical reflexiveness
about its limits and possibilities; they seek to stimulate consideration
both of the distinctiveness and integrity of individual disciplines, and of
the transgressive potential of interdisciplinarity. Each volume offers a
collection of new essays on a text of seminal intellectual and cultural
importance, displaying the insights to be gained from the juxtaposition
of disciplinary perspectives and from the negotiation of disciplinary
boundaries. The volumes represent a challenge to the conception of
authorship which locates the significance of the text in the individual
act of creation; but we assume that no issues (including those of interdisci-
plinarity and authorship) are foreclosed, and that individual volumes
viii Series introduction
drawing contributions from a broad range of disciplinary standpoints,
will raise questions about the texts they examine more by the perceived
disparities of approach that they encompass than by any interpretative
consensus that they demonstrate.
All essays are specially commissioned for the series and are designed to
be approachable to non-specialist as well as specialist readers: substantial
editorial introductions provide a framework for the debates conducted
in each volume, and highlight the issues involved.
We would, finally, like to dedicate the series to the memory of our
colleague Stephen Copley, whose insight and energy started it all.
Jeff Wallace, University of Glamorgan
John Whale, University of Leeds
General editors
Preface
All references to Peau noire, masques blancs will be to the following
edition: F. Fanon (1952) Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Seuil/Points.
This will be abbreviated throughout the collection as Peau noire. The
translation, by Charles Lam Markmann, is Black Skin, White Masks.
This was first published by Grove Press (New York) in 1967 but the
edition used here will be London: Pluto Press, 1986. The page references
for both editions are the same. This will be abbreviated throughout
the collection as Black Skin. Some of the contributors have modified
the Markmann translation, indicated by tr. mod. in the text, or have
used their own translations (also indicated in the text). All quotations
from Peau noire consist of the French original followed by the English
translation. Translations of short quotations will follow the original in
the body of the text while translations of longer quotations will be in
footnotes.
I wish to thank all the contributors to this collection. I would also
like to thank Manchester University Press for their patience in waiting
for the manuscript. My special thanks go to my family, who are my
source of inspiration.