Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks: a Study on Identity Crisis

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Sam Antony II MA English, St Aloysius College (Autonomous) Mangalore, Karnataka sam010antony@gmail.com Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks: A Study on Identity Crisis Introduction Frantz Fanon (1925 -1961) was a writer, psychiatrist, revolutionary, and pioneer of anti and post colonial thought. He was born in the Caribbean islands of Martinique, which was then and as it is still today, an overseas department of France. He received a middle class education and while on the island studied under and befriended Aime Cesaire (pioneer of Negritude movement).He was one of a few extraordinary thinkers supporting the decolonization struggles occurring after World WarII, and he remains among the most widely and read and influential of these voices. His revolutionary life produced two potent works which are Black Skin White Masks and Wretched of The Earth. Chinua Achebe was born on 16th November 1930 and died recently. He hails from Anambara state in eastern Nigeria. Achebe treats the haunting themes of culture, power and dictatorship with candour, wit and satire. His reputation was quickly established with his first novel Things Fall Apart(1958) which has been translated to in over one twenty world languages. He published his second novel No Longer at Ease in 1960 and Arrow of God in 1964.His other main work includes A Man of the People (1966), Morning yet on Creation Day, Beware Soul Brother and Girls at War. Black Skin White Masks I am talking of millions of men who have been skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement (Aime Cesaire, Discourssur le Colonialisme) Black Skin White Masks is one of the major works which immortalized Frantz Fanon among the post colonialist theoreticians. With the exploration of the psychology of dehumanization, dependency and de masculinisation of
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