ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the interconnected influences of Merleau-Ponty and Marx upon Fanon enables Turner to highlight a number of crucial themes in Black Skin, White Masks. It provides the role of psychological investigations in analyses of social problems such as colonialism and racism by means of a careful phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon’s writings. The book examines Fanon’s “work in psychology,” taking as inspiration the declaration, in Black Skin, White Masks , that he will “leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians.” It also provides a meticulous overview of Fanon’s most important critiques of psychological understandings of Black experience and colonialism within Black Skin, White Masks. The book seeks to interrogate Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological descriptions of the embodied experience of anti-Black racism and his critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.
