ABSTRACT
Thus Frantz Fanon, refusing to give way on two key elements of the psychoanalysis of racist culture put forward through Peau Noire, Masques Blancs: the cultural formation of dreams and the imago of the black man as the dream of European culture.1 First published in French in 1952, translated into English in 1967, Black Skin, White Masks brings together with his analysis of race politics both Fanon’s experiences of colonial psychiatry and his reflective appropriation of a range of different psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions. As such, the book remains central to what Homi Bhabha has described as Fanon’s “mythical” reputation as “the prophetic spirit of Third World Liberation… the inspiration to violence in the Black Power movement” (Bhabha 1986:viii). It is also, I think, essential to the development of what can appear in cultural studies as the wish for, or the lure of, a psychopolitics of culture, a wish that has made itself felt through psychoanalysis at least since the publication of Freud’s studies in the origins and discontents of “civilization”. It is there, too, and agitating, from beginning to end of Black Skin, White Masks in so far as Fanon turns to psychoanalysis for a way of thinking about what could be described as the veridical dimensions of culture: provisionally, those aspects of cultural life which, going beyond what Jacques Lacan refers to as the “two terms of reason and need”, appear to be dominated by the pressures of fantasy, of the dreamwork, on that life itself (Lacan 1992:209). “But when we say, ‘Fanon insists in “The negro and psychopathology”, that European culture possesses an imago of the negro responsible for all the conflicts that may arise’, we do not go beyond the real [le réel]” (Fanon 1952:136-7; 1986:169; t.m.).
