BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

by Frantz Fanon ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1967

One of the ironies of history is the pervasive debt anti-colonial revolutionaries owe to European thinkers. The writings of the late FLN theoretician and apostle of ""negritude,"" Frantz Fanon, for instance, ripple with the Marxian class war, Sorelian violence, Rousseauist utopianism and, of course, the polemics of Sartre, his master and friend. Fanon's famous manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, described his experiences as a psychiatrist at a French Military hospital in Algeria, the ""colonial neurosis,"" the struggle for liberation, and the dream of an African ""Third World."" It is a tough, rich, infuriatingly rhetorical work in which pleas for and diagrams of socio-political revamping almost always get swamped by fiery displays of Jacobin idealism, imperious exhortations, threats. Black Skin, White Masks, his first effort, written just about a decade before his death at thirty-six in 1961, is of much less interest or importance. It suffers from a good deal of youthful pretentiousness (Fanon had a mania for arbitrary citations), a rhapsodically muddled style, a by-now trite theses (""the black soul is a white man's artifact""), and a summation (""For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white""). This appears to fly in the face of his later position. An intermittently powerful racial study.

Pub Date: April 5, 1967

ISBN: 0802143008

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION