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Continuing on Black Skin White Masks (1952) with guest Lawrence Ware.
We've reached the most influential chapter (five), "The Fact of Blackness" (also translated as "The Lived Experience of the Black Man"), where Fanon describes how negative images of blackness in society fix the identity of black folks, trapping them in perpetual self-consciousness, and how Fanon himself felt about and reacted to this. He describes successive coping strategies that include the desire to become invisible, the attempt to assimilate (to become white), the violent rejection of the white gaze, the embrace of negritude, etc. These are all to be overcome eventually, but are they necessary steps, i.e., steps that should be encouraged to obtain psychological freedom from this social caste, or just what Fanon happened to experience, and other people would be better advised to cut to the end point where people are just people (i.e., humanism)?
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End song: "Malaika" by John Etheridge and Vimala Rowe; hear John interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #85.
Sponsors: Visit the St. John's College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi.
if folks are taken with Fanon they should check out the work of @XazaarAdjame
http://villes-noires.tumblr.com/
Im aware this is late in the game, as Ive been catching up, but the question of humanism still lingers unresolved in this episode. Id be interested (given there is quite a bit of discussion of existentialism and Nietzsche in this conversation) in everyone’s take on the Stirner’s critique of humanism in the infamous “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum.” if this is taken seriously, Ill note that its been poorly translated in the past, but fortunately there is a new translation by Wolfi Landstreicher that does well to articulate the quite interesting contestation, one that is arguably one of the most radical texts of the modern era, and predating Nietzsche (whom its been argued was directly influenced).