ABSTRACT
Black Skin, White Masks can be read as a long reflection on the body in historical time, as a phenomenology of the colonized consciousness. Fanon was attempting to describe objectively what could only be perceived from the inside: The subjective experience of being objectified. Not only then is Fanon’s work necessarily experiential, it is necessarily bodily, hence characterizations of the “exceptionally physical approach” of Black Skin, White Masks and the idea that the book is argued from the body. If we are to understand the trauma that racism is capable of inducing, we need to grasp the true risk it poses to the body, namely, the abolition of what is proper to the human, the freedom or play of bodily being within the world. Describing Fanon’s enrichment and challenge to previous (French) phenomenological notions of body and its relation to both world and the (ongoing) constitution of subjectivity, the chapter ends by stressing that the body remains an essential element in Fanon’s conscious attempt at inventing a new theory of alienation and a new form of psychiatry, one that is attentive to the historical and sociological context of the trauma.
