Response To Fanon's Essay

Frantz Fanon was a Martinique-born, Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post colonial studies, Marxism, and critical theory. He was born in 1925 and died in 1961. The quote above is from Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), originally titled as “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” Fanon, in this book is providing a prognosis about the lived experience of the black man. He is concerned with describing the place that is held by blacks in the mid 20th century and illustrates the issues of race and racism and to point the reader toward a better and free future for all men. The quote above shows how oppression gives rise to ways of being. Fanon’s experience and the background of the time period he was living in justifies his hostility when he argues that the black man is constantly trying, but never fully accomplishing, to be white and to integrate into the white man’s world. In this essay I will show the three phases Fanon goes through to reach this conclusion: to escape his blackness,

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

This ‘false identity’ to which Haugthon refers, is indicative of how most countries that were colonies operate. This has impacted the way we dress, speak and relate to each other. Stone (1992) posits that the because the social ideology of plantation society defined black people as being

Racism is an issue that blacks face, and have faced throughout history directly and indirectly. Ralph Ellison has done a great job in demonstrating the effects of racism on individual identity through a black narrator. Throughout the story, Ellison provides several examples of what the narrator faced in trying to make his-self visible and acceptable in the white culture. Ellison engages the reader so deeply in the occurrences through the narrator’s agony, confusion, and ambiguity. In order to understand the narrators plight, and to see things through his eyes, it is important to understand that main characters of the story which contributes to his plight as well as the era in which the story takes place.

Richard Wright and Alain Locke’s critique on Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God reveal the common notion held by many of the time, and still today, that there is a right and wrong way for a black person to talk and to act. Wright’s point of view of clearly racially charged and coming from a place of ignorance and intolerance. While, Locke’s point is simply due to a lack of an ability to think out of the box and observe deeper meaning, perhaps due to internalized oppression and a fearful desire to talk and act just like a white man in order to be taken seriously. Wright’s argument that the novel has no central theme and is parallel to minstrel shows, and Locke’s belief that Hurston uses relatable language to avoid diving into mature writing, are inherently wrong and fueled by the very issues Hurston was trying to combat: racism and sexism.

In midst of the radicalizations that were apparent in those times, Ferguson brings in the account of the transgendered mulatta. (p. 40). One can imagine the thought that went into this mulatta, where people of all races, sexual orientations could convulge and commit any act of vice that they deemed fit. In this Chapter, one sees a common theme, the expansive arguments around the heterogeneously composed African American culture – something that is visible to this day in the stereotyping that occurs with relation to queer people of color. One can also see another common aspect, in the way in which these articles show the way American industrialization disrupted hegemonic gender/sexual ideals as well as the people mistaking this disruption as racial differences. With the passage of time, these differences became more apparent, but the concept of queer people of color is still something that remains widely shrouded in question in the minds of ordinary

This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.

In the "Lived Experience of a Black man" chapter, Fanon asserts his anger towards the white man because a black person 's skin color is the basis for prejudice and thus they are not the ideal human. He is annoyed that when someone mentions a physician or a teacher and they are black, the white society seems surprised that these black scholars are gentle or intelligent. His anger leads him wanting to be accepted by the white man. He writes, "Like all good tacticians I wanted to rationalize the world and show the white man he was mistaken"(Fanon 98). He feels the need to show the white man that they are mistaken about believing all the negative thoughts about black people.

Douglas uses Fanon’s ideas on the importance of collective national consciousness and solidifies African American culture through his heroic images of it and mocking images of the values of White supremacy and capitalism. Douglas also emphasizes Fanon’s principle on advocating armed self-defense and revolutionary violence against the oppressors by including gun imagery. Douglas moves beyond the pacifist civil rights proclamations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and mobilizes agency Black hands, deterring state violence and healed the battered Black psyche, victimized from years of White Racist

Katherine McKittrick’s article goes back to “transatlantic slavery” and how this important historical event negatively impacted the lives of black bodies throughout history. Because of this occurrence, white bodies use ‘power

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

Furthermore, language is one of the most pervasive agents of phenomenological conditioning. To illustrate, Fanon analyzes the language because he argues that it carries and reveals racism in culture. Interestingly, he uses as an example the symbolism of whiteness and blackness in the French culture, which is similar to the English linguistic habits. In addition, Fanon argues that one cannot learn and speak the language of the oppressor, which is racist and carries negative connotations about black people, without subconsciously accepting the cultural meanings embedded in equations of unity with whiteness and malevolence with blackness. In other words, to be white is to be good, and to be black is to be bad. Moreover, language is not only transparency

The inferiority complex placed upon the subaltern is adverse, calamitous, and destructive. The subalterns are and have been alienated, isolated, marginalized, and outed from the hegemonic forces. They are distinguished as that of a lower class, inferior, and they do not have a voice in the world because they are outside of the hegemonic class; they are not able to tell their side of history. “To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense.” In the world today, the reason why that we rarely hear from the subalterns is because their voice is viewed as inferior, they have assimilated into the colonial power’s culture, and loss of personal identity. However, from becoming aware about African intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon, and historical references to the conscious development of “racial constructs” will allow people to view the static images of subalterns in films in a different light; a light of awareness and outrage. It helps to give the subaltern a chance to tell his or her side of history and it results in talk about race in the world. In Frantz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Mask, it expounds that films, from the subaltern’s point of view, help to create is discourse about race relations in the Unites States and the world alike through allowing the view to think differently, express sympathy for the subaltern, and give as to why we rarely hear from the subaltern.

Frantz Fanon’s, Black Skin, White Masks provides an account of the detrimental effects of colonization and racism for the black psyche. He depicts through the personal retelling of traumatic objectification and through analysis of the productive and reproductive effects of collective catharsis a situation of a social psychosis. According to Fanon, there is something unambiguous about the situations of colonialism and racism that affect the black man, the nightmares that repeat colonial trauma and violence. However, Fanon discusses a specific type of trauma – colonial subjugation – which results in the black man’s “self-division” of his “two dimensions” It is in this text that he explicates the process of racialization as a painful and

Hall views cultural studies through an autobiographical approach and links it to different theories. He views it with Marxism first, citing its problems with Eurocentric Britain and how, ultimately, culture studies breaks away from Marxism. Next, he mentions Gramsci and his organic intellectuals who, Hall and other members in the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies, were familiar with an adhered to. Next, he views feminist theory which he claims broke in and explained the patriarchal ways of culture studies; race also changed his view of cultural studies. These, along with all movements, cause cultural studies to advance. However, listing all advance when trying to contain it to one theory, cultural studies, is difficult. Hall attempts to wrestle both American and British cultural studies, as well as intelligent and academic work.