Fanon (1925-1961) was born in the French West Indies and studied in France before moving to Algeria to join the independence struggle. In this text, originally published in French in 1952, he addresses the Black man’s condition, and more particularly his subjectivity and experience in the colonial context of the French West Indies and of France in general, also drawing parallel with North Africa and Indochina. Black Skin, White Masks is both a minute and complex description of the violence of colonization and a sketch of a liberation from its effects. A psychiatrist by training, Fanon investigates the psychological impact of both racism and colonization, with a strong focus on inter-subjective relations, including the intersection of race and gender relations. He uses a large variety of resources: philosophy (a critical reading of Sartre, an elaboration of Hegel’s slave-master dialectic, Leiris, Marcel, and contemporary linguistics) ; Marxism (materialism and alienation); psychiatry and psychoanalysis; the literary Négritude movement (Black Francophones writers who, starting in the 1930s, wrote about lived experience of blackness, displacement and colonialism). Its reception, though belated, has nevertheless made it one of the seminal works of postcolonial theory.
The Cycles of Heaven and History: Some Notes on Approaching Historical Immortality and the Project of Reconciliation from a Look at Nineteenth Century Straits Chinese Philosophy
The pluralism of The Shadow of God invites us to also consider ‘non-Western’ ways of ‘coming to terms with the world’ in historical immortality and the project of reconciliation. I offer two methodological notes for any such undertaking. The first note elaborates on Rosen’s point that ‘“non-Western’ cultures have been heavily influenced by Western ones—even in their opposition to the West” by examining the forgotten Straits Chinese philosopher, Tan Teck Soon, in the context of fin-de-siècle British colonial Singapore. The second note concerns a commitment to anthropocentrism in such considerations and how it might condition our search for ‘non-Western’ ways out of the ‘spiritual situation of the West’, even if we are to find ‘non-Western’ cultures uninfluenced by ‘the West’ such as the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi, which Tan based his version of historical immortality and attempt at the project of reconciliation upon