Black Skin White Masks

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| Black Skin, White Masks Black Skin, White Masks, is a book about being black in an anti-black world. It was written by Frantz Fanon, who has come to be known as one of the founding fathers of modern post-colonial critique. He was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1924 to a middle class family. Fanon volunteered to fight with French resistance during World War II and went on to study medicine and psychiatry on a scholarship in Lyon. It was while there that he realised that although he had proved his intellectual worth, he would never be accepted as an equal by the French. In a letter to his brother Fanon writes that he made a mistake in coming to fight for the interests of the French peasants who themselves don’t care. Following this, Fanon wrote about the effects of racism and colonization in ‘Black Skins, White Masks’, which was previously titled ‘The Disalienation of the Black Man’. It was influenced by Fanon’s direct experiences of racism which left him feeling slightly confused as he had always conceived himself as French. This was because of his education and cultural traditions which were influenced by the French language and living under French rule. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him. (Fanon 1986:10) Fanon then took up a post directing a psychiatric hospital in the Algerian city of Blida which was then still under French power. Fanon resigned from his post with the French Government and went to work for the Algerian War cause because he could no longer align himself with the French imperial viewpoint. Fanon was greatly influenced by the work of Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas although he rejected their concept of Negritude; the affirmation of the black personality and
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