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I Frantz Fanon

Other Works by Frantz Fanon

Published by Grove Press:

The Wretched of the Earth

A Dying Colonialism

Toward the African Revolution

BLACK SKIN,

WHITE MASKS

Translated from the French by
Richard Philcox

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~
Grove Press

New York

Originally published in the French language under the title Peau noire,
masques blancs by Editions du Seui!, Pads.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fanon, Frant7., 192.5-196l.

noire, masques blancs.
Black white masks I Frant7. Fanon ; translated from the French by

Richard Philcox.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-I0: 0-8021-4300-8
IS BN -13: 978-0-8021-4300-6
1. Black race-Social conditions. 2. Black race-Psychology.

I. Title.
GN645.F313 2007
305.896-de22

2006049607

Grove Press
an imprint of GrovelAtlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction
xi

Chapter One
The Black Man and Language

1

Chapter Two

The Woman of Color and the White Man

24

Chapter Three

The Man of Color and the White Woman

45

Chapter Four

The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized

64

Chapter Five

The Lived Experience of the Black Man

89

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II

II

vi / Contents II

Iii Chapter Six
The Black Man and Psychopathology

III 120
III

,I,Iii
II’ Chapter Seven
il The Black Man and Recognition
j, 185

A. The Black Man and AdlerII
il 185
/’

B. The Black Man and Hegel
II’1 ,1 191

1

Chapter EightII
By Way of ConclusionIII

198Iii
ill

II

I

‘II

II!

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Ii

IIIII

III
III

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FOREWORD

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925 and went
to school there first, before moving to metropolitan France
to continue his education. During the Second World War,
he served in the Free French Army, which took him for
the first time to North Africa. After the war, he studied
medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyons, com­
pleting his training in 1951. Two years later he was appointed
to run the psychiatry department of the Blida-Joinville hos­
pital in Algeria; and he soon joined the Algerian liberation
movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN), contrib­
uting to its underground newspaper, al-Moujahid. He was
expelled from Algeria by the French authorities in 1957,
moving before long to Tunisia, where he practiced psychia­
try and continued to work for the FLN. In 1961, he was
appointed ambassador to Ghana by the Algerian provi­
sional government, but he died of leukemia that year.

Fanon’s short life would probably have been only a foot­
note to the end of France’s colonial empire in Africa if he
had not written two books: Black Skin, White Ma’3ks, which
you hold in your hand, and The Wretched ofthe Earth. In
these books (and in his other writings), Fanon explored the
nature of colonialism and racism, and the psychological
damage they caused in colonial peoples and in the colo­
nizer. He also wrote provocatively about the role of vio­
lence in the anticolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth

vii

1
viii / Foreword

century and his ideas were enormously influential on
intellectuals around the world in the years after his death.
There are three intertwined themes in Fanon’s writing: a
critique of ethnopsychiatry (which aimed to provide an
account of the mental life, in sickness and in health, of
colonized peoples) and of the Eurocentnsm of psycho­
analysis; a dialogue with Negritude, then the dominant
system of thought among black francophone intellectuals,
in which he challenges its account of the mental life of
black people; and the development of a political philoso­
phy for decolonization that starts with an account of the
psychological harm that colonialism had produced.

As the list of these themes makes clear, Fanon’s work is
profoundly shaped by his training as a psychiatrist, and by
his response to the work of European ethnopsychiatrists
trying to understand the psychology of non-European
peoples. But, like all Mrican and Afro-Caribbean intellec­
tuals in the francophone world in the mid-century, he was
also molded by the ideas of the Negritude movement. In
this, his first book, Black Skin, White Mask