Critical Review of Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth", were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and Coloniser. Jean-Paul Sartre recognised Fanon as the figure "through whose voice the Third World finds and speaks for itself." This innovative film biography (Issac, Julien, Frantz Fanon : Black Skin, white Mask, 1995 California Newsreel, San Francisco) restores Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions around post-colonial identity. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon received a conventional colonial education. When he went to France to fight in the Resistance and train as a psychiatrist, his assimilationist illusions were shattered by the gaze of metropolitan racism. Out of this experience came his first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." Fanon here defined the colonial relationship as the psychological non-recognition of the subjectivity of the colonized. Soon after taking a position at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, Fanon b
He brought about a lot of change in the outlook of the Coloniser-Colonized relationship but at the same time some of his concepts were not appreciated very much such as the way he looked at the black women. That is the blacks from Antilles thought they were closer to the western civilisation that the other black community from the other parts of Africa. These thoughts of Fanon are widely criticised but never the less his ideas are thought about, read and used to this day. He blamed them for discarding the black men and wanting white men just because they were superior. In the article from his book Frantz Fanon says, (Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Mask, 1952;18) that "the Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter - that is, he will come closer to being a real human being in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language". The Colonisers feels such a superiority that they treat the blacks like children just to show them that they are inferior to the whites. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty. They did not come down in level to the black people as they thought but actually put the level of the black people even lower. " "I am not at all exaggerating: A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. This is the exact outcome the Coloniser expects to achieve and is the culture that the Coloniser tries to emulate. This notion of Fanon, regarding the undying efforts put by the Colonized is so true. He means to say that the black people of the Antilles were so oppressed by the idea of the supremacy of the Colonisers that they no more had any confidence on their own culture and language. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships.
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Acceptance Essays
