FRantz Fanon and psychopathology: The progressive infrastructure of Black Skin, White Masks

Most readings of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks tend to focus on the fifth chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black.” As a result Fanon is read for what he has to say about the individual experience of anti-Black racism. In this chapter I argue that that the sixth chapter, “The Negro and Psychopathology, " is the decisive one: It is there that he clarifies his relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire, and the negritude movement beyond the point at which he left it in the fifth chapter; it is also there that he shifts his focus to the white world and the effects of its “cultural imposition.” It is only when Black Skin, White Masks is read from the perspective of the sixth chapter that the progressive structure of the book becomes clear. The fifth chapter ends in tears, but the sixth chapter is a call to action.