Frantz Fanon: Existentialist, Dialectician,

and Revolutionary
by

LaRose T. Parris
LaGuardia Community College - City University of New York
Brooklyn, New York
[email protected]

Abstract
Most theorists consider Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth the preeminent work on Third
World liberation. Nevertheless, Fanon’s earlier text, Black Skin, White Masks, presents a unique
application of psychoanalysis, dialectics, and existentialism to the colonial situation. This
unprecedented theoretical pastiche established the foundation for Fanon’s seminal liberationist
ideology

If one is nearly everywhere told that one is not fully a human being, but one finds
oneself struggling constantly with human responsibilities – over life and death,
freedom and lack thereof…the moment of theoretical reflection demands
engagement with such idiosyncrasy…including engagements with ontological
questions of being – for example, essence, necessity, contingency, and possibility
– and teleological questions of where humanity should be going – for example,
liberation, humanization, and freedom.
-- Lewis Gordon

Blacks alone are reduced to being a color…And though they are not the only
victims of racism, blacks alone have been set apart, degraded and ostracized
exclusively on the basis of race and color. Thus the striving to create and affirm
our identity and humanity in defiance of racial essentialization and domination
forms the common ground of the black liberation struggle. The struggle for
identity entails a struggle for a liberated ‘black consciousness.
-- Robert Birt

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As a psychiatrist and political philosopher, Fanon’s concerns are the psychology, materiality, and
ontology of the colonized subject; thus he reinterprets psychoanalysis, materialism and
existentialism in Black Skin, White Masks to thoroughly scrutinize the colonial subject’s lived
experience of racism. While it is generally held that existentialism and materialism represent
opposing philosophical modes, this perception should not occlude existentialism’s more practical
and implicitly materialist preoccupation with the human condition. Indeed, existentialism’s
ideological influence:

…derives from the fact that it has concerned itself with human existence in its
cultural and historical context…existential philosophers have deliberately and
self-consciously addressed themselves to the human situation as they themselves
have been involved in it. (Schrader 3)

Since existential thought is firmly grounded in historical and cultural contexts, and its theorists’
experiences of said social fields, this proves that two of its principal themes – Being and freedom
– may be more radically interrogated and applied to the social and material field of history itself.
Historians and theorists from the African Diaspora have explored the existential themes of Being
and Freedom since the late nineteenth century:

The…ontological question was examined by many philosophers and social critics

of African descent in the nineteenth century, including such well-known and
diverse figures as Martin Delany, Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and (early)
Du Bois. It was not until the late 1940’s, however, that a self-avowed existential
examination of these issues emerged, ironically through the work of a European
philosopher – namely, Jean-Paul Sartre. (Gordon 8-9)

It is ironic that Jean-Paul Sartre would categorize these philosophical issues under the rubric of
existentialism more than a century after these same questions were raised by Africana thinkers
who were directly affected by the material conditions of chattel slavery, racial oppression, and
their attendant phenomenological effects.

In the 1950’s Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre applied the ontological and phenomenological
aspects of existential philosophy to dialectical materialism, forging a multi-disciplinary discourse
against the capitalist and hegemonic exigencies of Western empire. Fanon and Sartre
reinvigorated existentialism’s philosophical base to consider the complicating elements of anti-
Arab and anti-African racism on colonial identity formation during the French-Algerian War.
The subsequent decolonization of Algeria, which served as the revolutionary template for the
remainder of the colonized Third World, provided Fanon and Sartre with a contemporary
example of dialectical materialism within the context of empire, one that readily accommodated
the socio-political aspects of existentialist thought vis-à-vis global decolonization.1

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Though it is generally held that Fanon’s radicalism was born of his commitment to the Algerian
decolonization struggle, the seeds of his radicalism lay in the 1952 publication of his first book,
Black Skin, White Masks.2 In it, a distinctly Fanonian theoretical method is established. Fanon
not only breaks with the Negritude philosophy of his mentor, Aimee Cesaire, but he combines
elements of psychoanalysis, dialectics, materialism, and existentialism to establish a theoretical
foundation that would became the basis of his later political writings.3 Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks (1952, 1967) expands existential philosophy’s focus on Being and Freedom to
emphasize the ideological and material effects of anti-African racism under European colonial
rule, thereby revealing existentialism’s potential use as a discursive critique against empire.

Fanon’s Radical Methodology

A trained psychiatrist when he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon ostensibly employs
psychoanalytic methods to probe the colonized subject’s “abnormal” psyche. Fanon’s
methodology combines what he terms ontogeny, phylogeny, and sociogeny. This integrative
process calls for a holistic analysis of the individual colonial subject, the collective colonized
subject class, and the larger colonial society as dysfunctional outgrowths of European empire.4
Fanon uses this method of examining the colonized subject and the colonizer to theorize on
Being and Freedom within what he terms the Manichean colonial world, a world where the
colonizer represents the embodiment of universal good and the colonized that of pure evil.
Fanon’s white-Black binary is further complicated by three centuries of attendant philosophical
and political developments, for his Manichean colonial world is delineated through an anti-
imperialist and pro-liberationist discourse that revises elements of Hegelian dialectics, Marxist
materialism, Heideggerian phenomenology, and Sartrian Existentialism by positing the colonial
subject’s quest for freedom.5

Fanon utilizes this theoretical pastiche to elucidate the totalizing oppression of Western
hegemony and empire, and its impact on several related fields of the colonial subject’s lived
experience: the psychological, the material, the dialectical, and the existential. Therefore, as
someone committed to “analyzing and destroying” the “psychoexistential complex” resulting
from the “juxtaposition of the black and white races” (12), Fanon must reveal breadth and depth
of said complex(es). To that end, he applies, and thereby revises, key principles from these
divergent schools of Western thought in his analysis of the colonial subject, in particular, and the
ideological structures of European colonialism, in general. In doing so, he not only reveals the
psychological (individual) and institutional (social) effects of imperial hegemony, he also
illuminates their firm hold on the colonized subject’s psyche in the manifestation of an insidious
inferiority complex.

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The ideological structures of colonialism, indeed, colonialism’s very survival, demands the
complete eradication of native culture, history, citizenship, and language; and the replacement of
these with European systems of culture, history, citizenship, and language. Fanon holds that:

Insofar as he conceives of European culture as a means of stripping himself of his

race, he becomes alienated…it is a question of a victim of a system based on the
exploitation of a given race by another, on the contempt in which a given branch
of humanity is held by a form of civilization that pretends to superiority. (224)

The native must be convinced of her essential inferiority in order for her to submit to foreign
rule, thereby ensuring the colonial project’s very survival. The colonial world creates and
perpetuates a collective inferiority complex among its colonized subjects; thus, European cultural
imperialism and internalized inferiority become the dualistically defining characteristic of the
colonized subject’s lived experience. Fanon further expostulates that: “The feeling of inferiority
of the colonized is correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority” (93).

Fanon depicts the colonial world as a nearly impenetrable systemic fortress of Western
hegemony, but his diagnosis is not fatal. He posits the potential for native freedom and, in doing
so, reveals the colonial subject’s necessary quest for ontological fulfillment, human potential
realized by risking death in a violent confrontation for recognition and freedom. Fanon reveals
the liberated consciousness of the colonial subject, and the resultant liberated society, as the
pinnacle of existential actualization. Thus, through Black Skin, White Mask’s theoretical
mélange of psychoanalysis, dialectics, materialism, and existentialism Fanon accomplishes two
unprecedented discursive feats: Being and Freedom seemingly reach their apotheosis within the
historical and political context of African diasporic liberation. And somewhat paradoxically,
European-centered schools of Western thought are used to posit the colonial subject’s liberated
consciousness as the quintessential site of existential actualization and the foundation for
collective revolutionary action.

Black Skin, White Masks’ imagistic title seemingly announces the multi-disciplinary approach
Fanon uses to probe the colonial subject’s crisis of self-identification, as the binary formulation
of Black skins and white masks describes several theoretical dichotomies: psychoanalytical, in
the employment of a mask to obscure true identity; dialectical, in the play of opposing racial
identities and symbolically Manichean forces; and ontological, in the subsuming of Black
identity by the mask of white identity. The Negro is Black but, according to Fanon, the
stultifying effects of colonialism’s white mask prevent her from existing by and for herself. She
must exist by and for white civilization, for as Fanon states in Black Skin, White Masks’
introduction: “White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on
the Negro” (12).

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This existential deviation is manifest in the colonized subject’s forced denial of her own native
identity. Wearing a white mask negates native/Black identity and all that it represents: racial
and ethnic particularity, racial self-identification, and native history and culture. A colonial
subject, himself, Fanon understood colonialism as the historical, ideological and material
deviation that breeds what he terms psychological “disalienation” (or alienation) in colonized
subjects. So while Fanon begins by declaring Black Skin, White Masks a psychological study, he
simultaneously insists that the colonial subject’s inferiority complex is the direct result of
extenuating socio-economic forces created by the material realities of colonialism. In his
introduction Fanon announces that:

The analysis that I am undertaking is psychological. In spite of this it is apparent

to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate
recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it
is the outcome of a double process: primarily economic; subsequently, the
internalization – or better the epidermalization – of this inferiority. (10)
(emphasis added)

The social and economic realities of colonialism that necessitate native poverty and degradation
while ensuring imperial wealth and privilege, according to Fanon, also contribute to the
colonized subject class’ inferiority complex, for a causal link is established between the
impoverished material conditions of colonial oppression and the native’s identity as a Black-
skinned colonized subject. Fanon’s colonial disalienation, or self-alienation, is the
internalization of native inferiority. This condition makes the colonial subject’s plight
ineluctable, for as long as she is Black she will remain inferior in the eyes of the European
colonizer and justifiably oppressed. The colonized is seemingly locked into a cycle of
oppression, a material condition that catalyzes the psychological complex of self-alienation. To
prove that the material reality of colonial oppression creates and maintains psychological
complexes, Fanon illuminates the ways in which a detailed study of colonialism imbricates two
critical approaches that are generally perceived as theoretically opposed: dialectical materialism
and psychoanalysis. On Black Skin, White Masks’ critical juxtaposition of these contrasting
theoretical methods, it has been observed that:

The audacity of [Fanon’s] insight is that it allows one to ask whether the
psychodyanmics of colonial power and anti-colonial subversion can be interpreted
by deploying…the same concept and techniques used to interpret the
psychodynamics of the unconscious…in Black Skin, White Masks…he insists
that…racial alienation is not only an ‘individual question’ but also involves a
‘socio-diagnostic’. Reducing Fanon to a purely formal psychoanalysis, or a
purely structural Marxism, risks foreclosing precisely those suggestive tensions
that animate…the most subversive elements in his work. (McClintock 94)

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It is these suggestive tensions between Marxism and psychoanalysis that establish critical
commonalities, which, in turn, forge unexpected linkages between these divergent approaches.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon demonstrates how the (individual) colonial subject’s
abnormal psychological state is the result of an aberrant (social) material state: that of a
dominated, subjugated, and degraded colonized existence. The colonial subject’s awareness of
being is, therefore, distilled from the oppressive material conditions of Western domination that
compromise her individual psyche and ontology. For this reason, Fanon’s quote bears repeating:
“If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: -- 1 primarily economic;
subsequently 2, the internalization – or, better the epidermalization of this inferiority” (10).

Contextualizing Fanon
Before examining Fanon’s explorations of Being and Freedom in Black Skin, White Masks, it is
first necessary to situate Fanon as a psychiatrist and intellectual whose motivations were
professional, stemming from his chosen field of psychiatry; social, originating in his
identification as a colonial subject; and intellectual, arising from his intense study of Western
philosophy.6 During his psychiatric residency in France at Saint Alban hospital in 1952, Fanon
studied under a professor who exposed him to socio-therapy, a psychiatric method that stresses
the indivisibility of the patient from her specific social environment and societal orientation.
This form of socio-therapy offers a diagnostic method that places equal weight on the individual
and her social orientation. With the colonial subject as his patient, Fanon seemingly applied this
method of socio-therapy to the individual, to the social setting of the French colonial Antilles,
and to the wider colonial world.7 In addition to Fanon’s professional forays into socio-therapy,
he was exposed to a significant amount of existentialist literature in 1950’s France. Fanon
studied the works of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, among the works of other
philosophers whose exegeses on phenomenology and ontology complimented Fanon’s earlier
undergraduate education in the principal authors of Western radical theory: Karl Marx, Vladimir
Lenin, and Leon Trotysky.8 Based on Fanon’s exposure to psychiatric socio-therapy’s
materialist concern with the individual as a product of her social milieu, it seems that his
methodology in Black Skin, White Masks resulted from his application of socio-therapeutic
analysis to his examination of the colonial situation. Fanon uses the colonized subject as the
psychiatric patient, just as he analyzes her larger socio-political context as a subject of Western
empire, affected by its attendant ideological and political discourses of racism. This distinctly
Fanonian method combines key principles from the schools of thought to which he was exposed
as a colonial subject studying in the European metropole: psychoanalysis, dialectics, materialism,
and existentialism.

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While some consider Fanon’s theoretical approach idiosyncratic, there does exist a potentially
seamless conceptual progression from Freudian psychoanalysis to Heideggerian
phenomenology.9 Freud’s study of the unconscious motives behind human behavior offers a
theoretical bridge to Heidegger’s examination of ontology, for:

It is quite easy to make the transition from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of

human behavior to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. We need only to expand
our analysis in order to grasp the basic principles of ontology…Heidegger’s thesis
is that ontological concerns are operative in all…human activity. If Heidegger is
correct…ontology is relevant to the most commonplace features of our
experience. (Schrader 37)

One such prosaic feature of human experience would be desire; and according to Freud human
behavior is the cumulative manifestation of unconscious desires that shape one’s apprehension of
Being. Just as Freudian psychoanalysis implies that the unconscious dictates our experience of
Being through the (un)conscious manifestation of our desires, choices and actions, Heideggerian
phenomenology posits Being as the center of our lived experience since Being cannot be
divorced from the world in which we live:

Heidegger builds on Husserl’s central argument that subject and object, human
awareness and the environing world, are indissolubly linked. One cannot even in
principle treat the ego as something detached from its surrounding…the
phenomenologist must open himself up to the rich totality of
experience…(Hinchman and Hinchman189)

Somewhat paradoxically, Heidegger’s “rich totality of experience” includes a deliberate

consideration of the individual’s lived reality; thus Heidegger himself revises phenomenology by
positing a somewhat materialist premise: the individual, and her sense of Being, is inextricably
bound to the subjective experience of her social world. Indeed, Heidegger’s Being and Time:
“…deals with the phenomenological study of everyday life…Heidegger…transformed
phenomenology…into a method through which to carry on a more radical inquiry into ontology,
the study of what it is to be” (Hinchman & Hinchman 189). Given that Heidegger’s work offers
a radical intervention into the study of Being, it is no surprise that Fanon would agree with
Heidegger’s thesis that individual ontology is the dichotomous reflection of the individual and
her societal milieu. For Fanon himself was a colonial subject, the very embodiment of historical,
ideological, and geo-political forces.

Fanon’s professional vocation as a psychiatrist and his social orientation as an intellectual

seemingly allowed him to build upon this connection between the psychoanalytic and the
phenomenological; yet Fanon accomplished something that neither Freud nor Heidegger could
because of their exclusive focus on the European subject.

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Fanon applied Freudian psychoanalytic theories on consciousness and Heidegger’s
phenomenological theories of Being to a dialectical and materialist analysis of the colonial
world.10 As Fanon states on his incorporation of differing methods in his examination of
colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks: “Although I had more or less concentrated on the
psychic alienation of the black man, I could not remain silent about certain things which,
however psychological they may be, produce consequences that extend into the domains of other
sciences” (48). Clearly, the extreme forces of hegemonic domination intrinsic to and necessary
for the survival of empire compelled Fanon to probe the afore-mentioned sciences and
philosophies of psychoanalysis and phenomenology.

Fanon’s exposition on the profoundly stultifying effects of racism as ideology and praxis on the
colonized psyche in Black Skin, White Masks was formulated as the direct result of his
methodical engagement with the political and philosophical tomes of Western discourse. This
dialogic engagement is made clear in several of Black Skin, White Masks’ chapter titles and sub-
titles: “The Negro and Psychopathology,” “The Negro and Hegel,” “The Negro and
Recognition.” Fanon biographer Irene Gendzier notes that:

…out of the amalgam of men and ideas that affected Fanon, there were other
historic figures, notably Marx, Freud, and Hegel, whose presence is to be
discerned in his works. It was through the inner debate he engaged with these
men, a debate molded by events in which he found himself, that Fanon eventually
evolved an intellectual and political position of his own. (21) (emphasis added)

Fanon’s inner debate with these theorists raises several questions about the epistemic,
ideological, and institutional aspects of anti-African racism that are highlighted in his
theorization of the Manichaean colonial world, a world whose dualistic white-Black, good-evil
binary quite conveniently lends itself to another interpretive juxtaposition of Freudian
psychoanalysis and Marxist materialism. Through a psychoanalytic reading, the “evil”, Black
native may symbolize the wildly undisciplined id and the “good”, white colonizer that of the
tempered, controlling super-ego. A materialist critique of Fanon’s Manicheaism reveals the
dialectics of empire: the white, European ruling colonial class oppresses the Black
native/colonized class until resistance, which is imminent, occurs.

Nevertheless, Fanon ostensibly announces psychoanalysis as his primary method in Black Skin,
White Masks, declaring: “Before beginning the case, I have to say certain things. The analysis
that I am undertaking is psychological” (10). Fanon’s brand of psychoanalytic engagement,
however, also utilizes a critical framework that examines the irrational dimensions of the
colonial world:

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 Psychoanalysis’ interest in the problem of identification provides Fanon with a
vocabulary and an intellectual framework in which to diagnose and to treat not
only the psychological disorders produced in individuals by the violence of
colonial domination but also the neurotic structure of colonialism itself. At the
same time, its investigation of alterity within the historical and political frame of
colonialism suggests that identification is neither a historically universal concept
nor a politically innocent one. A by-product of modernity, the psychoanalytic
theory of identification takes shape within the larger cultural context of colonial
expansion and imperial crisis. (Fuss 20) (emphasis added)

Indeed, Fanon’s application of psychoanalytic principles to the colonial problem allows him to
establish the colonial subject’s individual identity formation as indiscrete from the ideological,
political, and material history of European imperialism and colonial domination. Fanon declares
emphatically that the colonial subject’s self-identification is informed by her awareness of the
specific power relationship of Western domination and Black oppression.

While Diana Fuss is quite right in asserting that psychoanalysis provides Fanon with the lexical
and critical frame for his examination of the colonized individual and the larger colonial society,
I would argue further that Fanon uses psychoanalysis in the colonial setting as a contextual
springboard to leap into a more nuanced exploration of linkages among psychoanalysis,
dialectics, materialism, and existentialism. Fanon teases these connections out through an
analysis of the colonial subject’s lived experience. On Black Skin, White Masks’ employment of
psychoanalysis and his acute awareness of the need for dialectical engagement in the colonial
setting, Fanon himself explains that:

When I began this book, having completed my medical studies, I thought of

presenting it as my thesis. But dialectic required the constant adoption of
positions. Although I had more or less concentrated on the psychic alienation of
the black man, I could not remain silent about certain things which, however
psychological they may be, produce consequences that extend into the domain of
other sciences. (48)

Despite Black Skin, White Masks’ psychoanalytic subject matter, and Fanon’s need to meet his
professional training requirement, he reveals his deep engagement with Hegelian and Marxist
discourse by holding fast to the requirements of dialectic. He explicitly states that he could not
write Black Skin, White Masks as a purely psychological study because he saw the colonial
subject’s psychological alienation as the result of the historical and material alienation of
European hegemony and colonial rule. For Fanon, the crisis of empire provides the ideal socio-
political and ideological field within which to apprehend the colonial subject’s internalization of
hegemonic ideals and practices.

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This internalization of Western domination is also reflected in many of Black Skin, White Masks’
chapter titles: “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” The Man of Color and the White
Woman,” “The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized People,” and “The Fact of
Blackness.” Thus, Fanon’s engagement with the historical forces of colonization and
decolonization seemingly compels him to identify their material, psychological, and existential
effects upon the colonized subject’s psyche. Fanon forges ahead to explore more material and
ontological manifestations of racism and their impact on the colonial subject’s psyche through
her lived experience, and he begins this inquiry by citing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew
to denote the complex meaning of over- determination.

The Black native, the colonized subject, ever remains Black. This overdetermination, defined
first by Sartre and then revised by Fanon, is best explained through Black Skin, White Mask’s
excerpt of Sartre’s text: “They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the
stereotypes that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this
stereotype…We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside” (qtd.
in Fanon 115). Fanon goes on to differentiate between the Jew’s overdetermination and the
Black’s by stressing that the Jew, in most cases, has white skin that may obfuscate her Jewish
identity. For the Black, there is no chance of being perceived as anything other than Black.

Using himself as an example, Fanon highlights that: “…in my case everything takes on a new
guise. I am overdetermined from without. I am a slave…of my own appearance” (116).
Invoking the specter of chattel slavery to highlight his own self-alienation, Fanon insists that the
colonized subject’s overdetermination is as permanent as her Black skin. The reality of this
overdetermination and epidermalization is best captured in, “The Fact of Blackness” – in the
English edition (1967), and “The Lived Experience of the Black” – the direct translation from the
French edition (1952). Despite the different denotative and connotative meanings in these
respective chapter titles, both titles reveal the manner in which Black Skin, White Masks
combines phenomenology and ontology. As a branch of philosophy centered on the
“investigation of appearances” (Hinchman & Hinchman 187) the physical manifestation of
blackness is connoted in both titles. Where the English edition situates blackness, itself, as the
subject of a phenomenological inquiry, the French edition’s title positions the Black native as the
ontological subject under consideration, and the subject’s blackness becomes the de facto
phenomenon of her lived experience. In both cases blackness and the lived experience of being
Black, therefore, represent the ineluctable aspect of existential facticity in the colonial world.11

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Hailing and Hegel: Racist Interpellation and Hegelian Dialectics
In a chapter that critic Ian Baucom has called the most influential chapter of Black Skin, White
Masks,12 Fanon proceeds to define “The Fact of Blackness” – “The Lived Experience of the
Black,” through lengthy autobiographical encounters of his own racial objectification
instantiated by the interpellation of whites in a probing and revelatory manner. He challenges the
reader’s senses by exclaiming: “Dirty nigger,” or simply “Look a Negro!” (109). Here, Fanon
recounts his experiences of racist interpellation, seemingly positioning himself as the colonial
neurotic by delving in to his own damaged psyche:

Fanon goes to a deeper level of interiority: his own experience as lived. He finds
in his autobiographical moment, a set of theses converging. The chapter ‘The
Lived Experience of the Black’ begins with a little white boy’s use of language –
of publicity – to enmesh Fanon in the realm of pure exteriority, the realm of
epidermal schema. There, Fanon’s existence is a two-dimensional objectification.
(Gordon 33)

This two-dimensional objectification indicates an ontological shattering where Fanon’s very

humanity is seemingly called into question. Fanon proceeds to describe a cleaving of racially
stereotyped selves that the white boy’s hailing has elicited:

In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third
person but in a triple person…I was responsible at the same time for my body, for
my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I
discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by
tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-
ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho good eatin.’ (112) (emphasis added)

Fanon’s ontological triplication illustrates the manner in which the Black colonial subject
becomes a representation, for his physicality, race, and forebears while recalling internalized
stereotypes of blackness and African identity – from “cannibalism and fetishism” to African-
American southern identity – “Sho good eatin’”. These stereotypes reveal that in their
experiences of anti-African racism the Black colonial subject and the African diasporic subject
are one and the same for Fanon. Thus, the African diasporic subject cannot exist autonomously;
her ontology is ever problematized by the presence of whites. As Fanon further explains in
Black Skin, White Masks:

In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that

outlaws any ontological explanation…Ontology…does not permit us to
understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black;
he must be black in relation to the white man. (109-110)

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Fanon emphasizes the manner in which the Black’s apprehension of Being is problematized by
the ineluctable presence of the white individual and colonial society. Ontology for the Black
subject is not an a priori reality; instead it is a reality that becomes permanently compromised
and defined by its inescapable duality with whiteness and all that it represents – white
supremacy, anti-African racism, and racist stereotypes.

Fanon explores this lived binary in the afore-cited autobiographical encounters, and his reactions
bespeak the anger, shock, and trauma befitting one who is experiencing a form of existential
dread. In C.L.R. James’ assessment of Heideggerian dread, he contends that:

…Man is not afraid of anything in particular…the mere fact that you are
living…and you do not know what exactly is going to happen to you…that makes
in your existence the necessity of some kind of dread as to what is going to
happen to you in your future. (9)

For Heidegger dread is the feeling of foreboding. It is a foreboding that awakens the fear of the
known, death; and the unknown, the exact moment of death one’s death. For Fanon, this dread
occurs at the moment of racist interpellation: “Dirty nigger!” Fanon captures the recurring nature
of this dehumanizing hailing through repetition. He repeats the hailing four separate times
throughout the chapter; this repetitive act of exposition reflects the hailing’s frequent occurrence
in the colonial world as well as its devastating effects on the colonized subject’s psyche.

The existential issues of Being and Freedom in Fanon’s dialectical (and dreadful) colonial world
necessitate that due consideration be given to the originator of the dialectical process, G.W.F.
Hegel. In Black Skin, White Masks, the colonized subject’s quest for freedom is crystallized in
Fanon’s interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition and struggle in Phenomenology of
Mind. The Hegelian dialectic of individual consciousness and social recognition is laid bare
through Fanon’s somewhat paradoxical sub-section entitled, “The Negro and Hegel,” a heading
that raises several red flags. First, Hegel’s only position on the Negro is one of complete and
utter derision. His Lectures on the Philosophy of World History speciously establishes the Negro
as neither contributing to Western civilization nor possessing human consciousness. Secondly,
Black Skin, White Masks does not address the African’s historical and ontological erasure in
Hegelian discourse. Failing to refute or even mention Hegel’s anti-African bias makes Fanon’s
engagement with Phenomenology of the Mind extremely paradoxical, for Hegel’s dialectic of
human recognition and violent struggle encapsulates perfectly the lot of Africana peoples’ four
centuries long fight for freedom under Western domination.13 The very race Hegel deemed sub-
human is the same race whose long history of oppression and resistance is mirrored in Hegel’s
own seminal dialectic. The irony is rich.

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Given Hegel’s virulent anti-African position, Fanon’s attraction to Hegelian discourse appears to
be grounded in his posthumous mentor’s animation of history as the preeminent social field that
determines human experience. Hegel holds that history and culture make human beings who and
what they are: “For Hegel, man is first and foremost a being who functions within the context of
history and culture…he viewed human becoming as dominated by world history” (Schrader 13).
Since the colonial encounter is a consequence of Western hegemonic history, Fanon’s method in
Black Skin, White Masks is very Hegelian. His text proposes that the colonial subject’s
inferiority complex has been created by the history and culture of European empire and
colonialism; that the colonial subject is the direct product of her environment; and that she is
directly affected by the history and culture of European domination. It is no wonder that this
aspect of Hegelian discourse held allure for Fanon, as Hegelian discourse delineates the
connection between human alienation and world history even further: “The particular form of
alienation experienced by an individual depends upon his situation in world history and cannot
be overcome save as historical-cultural processes follow out of the logic of their development”
(Schrader 14). Thus, the colonized subject’s alienation (or disalienation as Fanon has renamed
it) is the direct result of the historical forces of Western imperialism and subjugation.

Human Recognition and Liberation

Setting aside the fact that Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History uses this same
argument to justify the excision of African civilization from the narrative of world history, Fanon
once again applies Hegelianism to modern colonialism. For Fanon, the colonized subject’s
alienation is a state of self-hatred created by the history and culture of European empire, and it
can only be overcome through the historical and political process of decolonization. This
process of radical historical and societal change may only be catalyzed through the antithesis of
the colonial inferiority complex: a liberated native consciousness that eventually crystallizes as a
collective quest for native freedom. This freedom is only possible through a confrontation,
indeed, a demand for human recognition from the colonizer. Fanon distills key ideas on
recognition from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind to reinterpret the problematic of human
recognition for the colonized created by the colonizer. In Fanon’s estimation Hegel stresses that:

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on
another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been
effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his
actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being that his own
human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of
his life is condensed. (216-217)

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In this colonial setting, Fanon asserts that the colonizer will remain the principal catalyst of the
colonized subject’s actions until the colonizer recognizes the native as a human being. The
meaning of the colonized subject’s life becomes located in the colonizer’s willful denial of her
humanity. Unless the colonizer recognizes and acknowledges the native’s humanity, according
to Fanon, a violent confrontation will ensue: “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;
only thus it is tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare
existence…” (qtd. in Fanon 218)

Quite paradoxically, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind makes a rather strong case against the
epistemological and ontological erasure of Africans inherent to Western discourse, for risking
one’s life for the attainment of freedom is and has been the nexus of Africana resistance to
chattel slavery and colonialism. Fanon extrapolates upon Hegel’s initial proposition, stressing
that:

…human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and

through the risk that conflict implies. This risk means that I go beyond life
towards a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my
own worth into a universally valid objective truth…He who is reluctant to
recognize me opposes me. In a savage struggle, I am willing to accept
convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the
impossible. (218)

For Fanon, the risk of death concretizes the essence of human existence: the need for human
recognition and the quest for freedom. His insistence that “he who is reluctant to recognize me
opposes me” represents the ultimate revolutionary challenge between the colonized subject and
the colonizer. That Fanon accepts death as a possible outcome of a struggle for freedom reveals
Black Skin, White Masks as the originary text of Fanonian radicalism, rather than those works
written after his engagement with the French-Algerian War:

Several of Fanon’s interpreters suggest that he became aware of the necessity for
violence as a result of his Algerian experience. This does not seem to be the case.
For as early as his first book…published in 1952, Fanon had unmistakably arrived
at this conclusion by way of Hegel. In a section of that book devoted to “The
Negro and Hegel,” Fanon used the plight of the Negro to elaborate a theory of the
conditions under which the Negro could liberate himself. Fanon established that
Freedom…can only be established by a dialectical progression in which the
subjected individual imposes himself on the other in a violent demand for
acceptance. (Martin 392)

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In the colonial world, this violent demand for recognition reaches its apex in decolonization
struggles. Natives are not recognized as human beings worthy of exercising their right to
sovereignty; therefore they are forced, by the nature of this dialectic, to demand recognition from
their oppressors and court death to obtain it. For Fanon, violence and the risk of death mean that
the native’s life is transformed into the corporeal manifestation of the “universal objective truth”
of freedom:

In relating themselves to freedom through the readiness to die, the colonized

clearly indicate what is at stake…What comes first is not the recognition of
particularity but the humanity of the colonized, the struggle for recognition as
human being…Violence expresses this disincarnate, ethereal freedom. It is how
freedom exists less as an attribute than as the very subject exacting recognition
through the risking of life. The rehabilitative value of violence lies in the
equation that the colonized are ready to risk the only and most precious thing they
have, namely, their life, for their dignity and equality. (Kebede 549-550)

Kebede substantiates Fanon’s position that resistance to colonial oppression takes freedom out of
the realm of abstraction and into the concrete, inequitable world of human relations; thus the
inequities of racism and colonial oppression can only be eradicated through a struggle for
equality and freedom. This struggle begins with the individual’s ontological and political
awakening, the understanding that the colonized subject must break the chains of mental
enslavement. Consequently, there is an absolute necessity for a liberated consciousness in the
creation of a liberated society because:

There can be no radical transformation of identity without an entire struggle to

radically transform the social order. And no radical transformation of the social
structure is possible (nor would it have a purpose) without the transformation of
identity – the self-creation of a new kind of human being. It is this self-creation
and renewal that is the aim of all effort. (Birt 211)

This new human is one who has initiated her self-recreation by decolonizing her mind, by
disposing of internalized racism through the recognition of her own intrinsic value, and by daring
to restructure a formerly oppressive society into one that is not only more egalitarian, but one
that reflects her native culture, history, and identity. Clearly, Fanon’s call for native freedom in
Black Skin, White Masks reflects his ongoing dialogue with Marxist theory and its preoccupation
with social revolution and societal transformation. While Fanon engages with Marxism, it may
also be said that Fanon’s radicalism surpasses that of Marx because:

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 …Fanon goes beyond the Marxist characterization of violence as the ‘midwife of
history.’ He reads into the forceful resistance against colonialism the gestation,
the birth of a historical subject. Through violence directed at their oppressors, the
colonized peoples reconstitute their human self in an autonomous and unrestricted
way. (Kebede 554)

The creation of a liberated humanity through the revolutionary overthrow of European

imperialism in Black Skin, White Masks reaches another crescendo in The Wretched of the Earth.
In it, Fanon warns that: “Decolonization…is a historical process…Decolonization is the
veritable creation of new men” (36). And later:

Independence is not a word which can be used as an exorcism, but an

indispensable condition for the existence of men and women who are truly
liberated, in other words who are truly masters of all the material means which
make possible the radical transformation of society. (310)

For the newly liberated masses, existential self-actualization is born of violent confrontation and
risking death for human recognition. The natives’ hard won freedom leads to a radical
transformation of society specifically because the formerly colonized have become instruments
of true societal change by regaining dominion over their own land, culture, and resources.
Indeed, as they have regained control over their collective identity and existence the problem of
alienation ceases to exist.

With Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon achieves a critical tour de force. His professional training
in psychoanalysis and his dialogue with Western philosophers allowed him to elucidate areas of
theoretical convergence among varied schools of Western thought. Fanon uses the African
diasporic subject as a point of inquiry in this critical experiment and this makes his achievement
in Black Skin, White Masks unprecedented, for the Black subject was never considered in the
initial application of psychoanalysis, materialism, dialectics, or existentialism. Fanon analyzes
the Black colonial subject’s psychology and ontology; her lived experience is probed,
illuminating a convergence of psychology, dialectics, materiality, and existence that affect her
day-to day reality. It is a reality that reveals the Black colonized subject as a living embodiment
of Western discourse’s paradoxes. For once again the Africana subject, categorized as sub-
human by Hegelian discourse, wages battles for Being and Freedom that are outlined in
Hegelian, Marxist, and existentialist thought. In revising these critical approaches, Fanon
creates a distinctly Fanonian hermeneutics against empire that surpasses the radicalism of both
Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, for Fanon defines the attainment of freedom in the colonial
world as the apotheosis of existential actualization. This totality of being, according to Fanon,
creates a new race of humans capable of creating a world that is free of oppression, exploitation,
and hegemonic domination. Idealistic, yes, but Fanon locates this idealism in the complete
eradication of empire, a seemingly impossible feat that, if achieved, would necessitate that
freedom be realized by all.
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Notes

1
For a detailed discussion of Fanon and Satre’s theoretical engagement with the Algerian
decolonization struggle see Le Sueur, 227-249.
2
For a comprehensive analysis of Fanon’s earlier radicalization, see Martin.
3
For Fanon’s disenchantment with the Negridtude movement, see Caute, 21-23; Gendzier, 21;
Kebede, and Martin.
4
See Black Skin, White Masks, 11.
5
See Le Sueur, 227-249 and Gendzier, 4-21.
6
Regarding this call to contextualize Fanon, I do not support Henry Louis Gates’ call in “Critical
Fanonisms” to historicize Fanon as a means of neutralizing the conflicting contemporary critical
interpretations of Fanon’s work in postcolonial theory; rather I am attempting to show how
Fanon’s engagement with the philosophical and socio-political tomes of the Western canon
enabled him to radically expand their previously European-centered parameters. See Gates.
7
Although Fanon is rather firm in Black Skins, White Masks’ introduction that his study is
specifically pertinent to the colonial world of the French Antilles, the remainder of the text
makes numerous references to the colonial subject in general.
8
See Gendzier, 19-20.
9
On the back cover of the Grove Press 1967 edition of Black Skin, White Masks a reviewer from
Newsweek describes the text as, “…a strange, haunting mélange of existential analysis,
revolutionary manifesto, metaphysics, prose poetry, and literary criticism…”
10
Here, I make the distinction between dialectics and materialism because Fanon himself does.
He applies Hegelian dialectics to the colonial setting in a manner that is quite distinct from his
application of Marx’s dialectical materialism to the same.
11
See Schrader, 23-24, for an explanation of facticity as the empirically determined aspects of
human existence. Schrader also stresses that existentialist writers are equally concerned with
human freedom and the factuality of the human situation.

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12
See Baucom for an analysis of radio’s pivotal role in the dissemination of liberationist
ideology in the African Diaspora.
13
Although Fanon engages quite vigorously with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, not once
does he mention Hegel’s excision of Africa from the stage of world history in Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History. In fact, Fanon takes several ideological jabs at mentor Aime
Cesaire’s Negritude philosophy by insisting that the discovery of ancient African kingdoms
would not dispel colonial alienation. See Black Skin, White Masks, 225-226.

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