Critical Review of Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth", were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and Coloniser. Jean-Paul Sartre recognised Fanon as the figure "through whose voice the Third World finds and speaks for itself." This innovative film biography (Issac, Julien, Frantz Fanon : Black Skin, white Mask, 1995 California Newsreel, San Francisco) restores Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions around post-colonial identity. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon received a conventional colonial education. When he went to France to fight in the Resistance and train as a psychiatrist, his assimilationist illusions were shattered by the gaze of metropolitan racism. Out of this experience came his first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." Fanon here defined the colonial relationship as the psychological non-recognition of the subjectivity of the colonized. Soon after taking a position at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, Fanon b
ecame involved in the bitter Algerian civil war, eventually leaving his post to become a full-time militant in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Out of this struggle, Fanon wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, which Stuart Hall describes as the "bible of the decolonization movement." (web source:http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/fanon.htm) "A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty."
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Approximate Word count = 1168
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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