Frantz Fanon Black Skin White Masks

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Frantz Fanon’, Black Skin, White Masks endeavours to explore the anecdotal details of his experience in France as the Black man, and the way that such an experience exposed the disjunction between what he thought he was, and what France revealed him to be. Fanon’s work is a testament to the way that in instances such as these, another image of self is created through the presence of ‘the other’, one often contradictory to the instilled image that an individual initially has of himself. Black Skin, White Masks advocates Fanon’s damaged sense of self as a result of a confrontation with a young French girl in Lyon, and can be understood specifically through the lens of Psychoanalytic Theory. This essay will first examine Black Skin, White Masks with respect to Fanon’s experiences as “the Colonised Other” (Fanon xvi), and unpack the notion of an individual producing an assumed image of identity, and the way that identification in itself, is the response of ‘the Other’, pertaining to the representation of the individual in “the differentiating order of Otherness” (Fanon xvi). It will then discuss Psychoanalytic Theory and its relevance to Fanon’s damaged sense of self, paying close attention to the discrepancy between the ‘I’ that he takes himself to be, and the image of himself, altered by reality, that he came to understand in France. Lastly, a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘ideal ego’ and the ‘ego ideal’ (Easthope 62) will allow a more detailed understanding of Fanon’s experience of cultural alienation, along with his discovery of his social limitations that only became apparent in his mirror version of his identity- identification from ‘the Other’. Ultimately, this essay aims to analytically explore the way that Fanon’s damaged sense of self was a result of the unconscious wearing of a white mask on a coloured face. Here, it is important to

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