Frantz Fanon and Racial Identity in Post - Colonial Contexts

Frantz Fanon and Racial Identity in Post - Colonial Contexts

1. Thinking post - colonial identity

   • Identity = social meanings & structural conditions
   • Identity = shifting/ change
   • Identity conditioned by power
   • Group identity = cultural resources available

2. Defining the post - colonial

   • Post colonial = period after Europeans owned colonies
   • Colonies gained political independence
   • Understanding relationship between coloniser and colonised
   • Understanding the dominance & resistance when colonies are being controlled by outside party

3. How racial oppression affects identity

   • The lived experience of the black man/ woman
     • Identity is influenced by the world around it
     • The world around the identity can change
     • Black skin - white masks
   • Racial alienation
     • Relationship between internal world of person and external world with constraints
   • Estrangement
     • Person can be estranged from their humanness, self, belonging to their people
     • All caused by race
   • The pathology of the colonial context
     • Racial contact = dominance by one group
     • Dominant through physical, cultural and economical terms
     • Racial contact = dominance = potential for psychopathology
   • Cultural dispossession: Alienation through language
     • Adopting language of oppressor = alienation
     • Improve in white culture but lose black culture
   • Dispossessed identities
     • Coloniser eradicates colonised's culture
     • Follows terms that devaluates colonised
     • Result = deeply rooted sense of inferiority
   • Lactification
     • Lessening of blackness to achieve whiteness
     • Desire is forced upon black subjects by white subjects
     • Abandon selves to achieve white acceptance
   • Double consciousness
     • Black identity = double consciousness
     • Colonised succeeds in colonisers culture
     • Colonised = distnaced from home culture
     • Disharmony between two sides
   • Synchrony between culture, nation and family
     • Family follows nation = synchronised = positive picture
     • No synchronisation = destructs social structure = violence
     • Synchronisation for identity
   • Violence internalised
     • Fanon = oppressed = personal conflicts and turmoil
     • Opressed = conditions for the destruction of racism

4. The identity dynamics of racism

   • Blackness essesntialised
     • Blackness = essential and determining quality of identity
     • Not the meaning the person makes for himself but the pre - existing one that leaves impression
     • Blackness functions as a fixed essence in speech and appearance
   • Qualifying, categorising, problematising the racial subject
     • Racist thinking defines individuals based on race, associations, values etc of that race
     • Prejudicial terms = idealise dominant class while problimitising dominated class
     • Black/ gay etc = understood through terms of categorical groupings
   • How Whiteness defines Blackness
     • Superiority of Whiteness requires the systemic devaluation of Blacks
     • Neagtive Black & Positive white = binary logic
     • Blackness is based on not being White

5. Identity development in oppressive contexts

   • Stages of marginal identity
     • Stage 1 = capitulation = identify with aggressor
     • Stage 2 = revitalisation = reacts towards powerful dominance (flight)
     • Stage 3 = radicalisation = committed to radical social change (fight)
   • The dynamics of cultural 'in - betweenity'
     • The grey area where all 3 stages of marginal identity overlap
     • When overlap = influence on each other = change

6. Critiques of Fanon

   • Sexism: black woman and white man & black man and white woman
   • Representing colonial relationship as one of complete dominance and control
   • Essentialist & static categories

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