ABSTRACT
Frantz Fanon offers a political and critical phenomenology that addresses the material and ontological conditions of possibility of doing phenomenology. In revealing the conditions that capacitate phenomenological method, Fanon at once gives a trenchant critique of the colonial horizon that phenomenological method presupposes yet ignores (its ‘epistemology of ignorance’) and traces a route to what is needed to deconstruct this. Focusing on Black Skin, White Masks, this chapter argues that the text enacts not only the failure of recognition but the beginning of a politics of refusal. This reading counters tendencies to culturalize or de-politicize the text as only a regional matter of racial identity—divorcing it from the anti-Black and colonial world that Fanon shows to be debilitating and that he works to refuse. When Black Skin, White Masks is read as merely a phenomenological description of colonized and racialized experience rather than a phenomenological critique and deconstruction of the colonization of experience, possibility, thinking, and temporality, then the radical transformation of phenomenology that Fanon enacts is elided—both as socio-diagnostic and therapeutic. We learn from Fanon that, if it is to be more than a regional study of lived experience structured by coloniality and whiteness, phenomenology must become anticolonial.
