Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

Wright, Colin

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 analyse 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 on Black Skin, White Masks against the backdrop of the recent international Black Lives Matter protests, as well as attempts within academia to ‘decolonise the curriculum’.

Citation

Wright, C. (2022). Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. In The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies (1-19). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_34-1

• Online Publication Date: Nov 29, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 30, 2024
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 1-19
• Book Title: The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies
• ISBN: 978-3031303654
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_34-1
• Keywords: Frantz Fanon; Psychosocial Studies; Postcolonial Theory; Psychoanalysis
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/25366374
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_34-1
• Contract Date: Jul 27, 2021