ABSTRACT
Mayotte longs, he notes, for “un peu de blancheur dans sa vie”, and admires her lover above all for his blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. While Fanon is celebrated as one of the great critics of racist discourse, the treatment of black women in his work has been perhaps one of its most controversial aspects. The rather sweeping brush strokes of Fanon’s reading of Capécia reveal, to be sure, a certain unease in his thinking towards the figure of the woman of colour. Fanon’s reading of Capécia has generated a good deal of criticism. One of the most systematic and thorough critical readings of Fanon’s chapter is that offered by Gwen Bergner, published in PMLA in 1995, and arguing that Fanon’s masculinist perspective is deeply structural. One of the issues raised by Fanon’s reading about which these critics disagree, however, is his treatment of the literary status of Capécia’s work.
