Black Skin, White Masks

by Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox (Translator)

Overview

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on black identity and critical race studies as Frantz Fanon's, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

A major influence on international civil rights, anticolonial, and black consciousness movements, Black Skin, White Masks is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important thinkers on revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in human history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802143006
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/10/2008
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	19,642
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Frantz Fanon (1925–61) was born in the French Caribbean island of Martinique. He studied medicine and psychiatry in France and worked in a hospital in Algeria between 1953 and 1956. He passionately identified with Algeria's armed struggle for independence and this led him to write The Wretched of the Earth (1961) which became a manifesto for the Third World. Black Skin, White Masks was first published in France in 1952.

Ziauddin Sardar is Visiting Professor of Science Policy at Middlesex University and consulting editor of the prestigious journal Futures. He is a prolific writer and is the author of Cultural Studies for Beginners, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism and editor, with Jerome Ravetz, of Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway.

Table of Contents

Foreword     vii
Introduction     xi
The Black Man and Language     1
The Woman of Color and the White Man     24
The Man of Color and the White Woman     45
The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized     64
The Lived Experience of the Black Man     89
The Black Man and Psychopathology     120
The Black Man and Recognition     185
The Black Man and Adler     185
The Black Man and Hegel     191
By Way of Conclusion     198

Editorial Reviews

“A strange, haunting mélange of analysis, revolutionary manifesto, metaphysics, prose poetry and literary criticism—and yet the nakedest of human cries.” —Newsweek

“A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair... As a writer he demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images. . . . Yet it is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellectual, who makes the book so hard to put down.” —Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review

“A reasoned, explosive, and important book centered on the identity problem of the black man, by the author of a classic study of racism and colonialism, Wretched of the Earth.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book should be read by every black man with a desire to understand himself and the forces that conspire against him.”—Floyd McKissick, former national director, CORE

From the Publisher