Reading Notes: Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

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Fanon, BSWM (Markman translation)

Intro

Chp 1 The Negro and Language

Chp 2 The Woman of Color and the White Man

Chp 3 The Man of Color and the White Woman

Chp 4 The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples

Chp 5 The Face of Blackness (preferred: “The Lived Experience of the Black”)

Chp 6 The Negro and Psychopathology

Chp 7 The Negro and Recognition

Chp 8 By Way of Conclusion

Intro

8 “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon … or too late.”

9 “the black is not a man” / negation, consciousness, cosmos, yes /

9 “the black is a black man … rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated”

[AC: the problem is not that the black is black, but the black is a man-notman]

9 “I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself”

10 “Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the qual value of the intellect. / How do we extricate ourselves?”

11 epidermalization

12 “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the stand-[13]point of time.”

13 “And this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence. In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducible to my time.”

13 “… I consider the present in terms of something to be exceeded.”

14 “… what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact.”

14 “The educated Negro, slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth, feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. … Then he congratulates himself on this, and enlarging the difference, the incomprehension, the disharmony, he finds in them the meaning of his humanity. Or more rarely he wants to belong to his people. And it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss. We shall see that this attitude, so heroically absolute, renounces the present and the future in the name of a mystical past.”

Upcoming Talks

Three upcoming talks:
[1] This Thursday, April 20th, “Dark Horizons” at The New School in NYC. More details in a previous post. LOCATION CHANGE – Now in Room 1200 at 6 E. 16th Street.
[2] The last week of April in Milwaukee at the Center for 21st Century Studies’s “The Big No,” a conference featuring keynotes by François Laruelle, Frank Wilderson, and others.
[3] Late May, the Cultural Studies Association at Georgetown.

Look forward to meeting people at all three of these!