In your plan: Week 48, Mon, 13 Sep 2027.
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Overview
Black Skin, White Masks, published in French in 1952, is Frantz Fanon's first book. A psychiatrist from Martinique, he examines how racism and colonial culture shape the inner life of Black people in a world organised by white norms. He looks at language, desire, recognition and the experience of being seen as a racial type. The book argues that the sense of inferiority is imposed by a social system and not inherent, and that it must be understood to be undone.
Context
Fanon grew up in French-ruled Martinique, where schooling taught identification with France, and studied medicine and psychiatry in France in the late 1940s. The book combines clinical observation, philosophy, literature and personal experience. It predates his involvement in the Algerian struggle.
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- Psychology of colonialism; the colonised internalise inferiority.
- Use in training and coaching
- Linguistic insecurity in English learners in South Asia: deeply relevant to spoken English programmes
- Connects to
- Hegel's recognition; Said
- What to read
- Black Skin ch. 1 (language)
- Text (date)
- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Black Skin, White Masks (1952, 1961)
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