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Frantz Fanon and Racial Identity in Post - Colonial Contexts

Thinking post - colonial identity
1. Identity = social meanings & structural conditions
2. Identity = shifting/ change
3. Identity conditioned by power
4. Group identity = cultural resources available
Defining the post - colonial
1. Post colonial = period after Europeans owned colonies
2. Colonies gained political independence
3. Understanding relationship between coloniser and colonised
4. Understanding the dominance & resistance when colonies are being controlled by outside party
How racial oppression affects identity
1. The lived experience of the black man/ woman
  1. Identity is influenced by the world around it
  2. The world around the identity can change
  3. Black skin - white masks
2. Racial alienation
  1. Relationship between internal world of person and external world with constraints
3. Estrangement
  1. Person can be estranged from their humanness, self, belonging to their people
  2. All caused by race
4. The pathology of the colonial context
  1. Racial contact = dominance by one group
  2. Dominant through physical, cultural and economical terms
  3. Racial contact = dominance = potential for psychopathology
5. Cultural dispossession: Alienation through language
  1. Adopting language of oppressor = alienation
  2. Improve in white culture but lose black culture
6. Dispossessed identities
  1. Coloniser eradicates colonised's culture
  2. Follows terms that devaluates colonised
  3. Result = deeply rooted sense of inferiority
7. Lactification
  1. Lessening of blackness to achieve whiteness
  2. Desire is forced upon black subjects by white subjects
  3. Abandon selves to achieve white acceptance
8. Double consciousness
  1. Black identity = double consciousness
  2. Colonised succeeds in colonisers culture
  3. Colonised = distnaced from home culture
  4. Disharmony between two sides
9. Synchrony between culture, nation and family
  1. Family follows nation = synchronised = positive picture
  2. No synchronisation = destructs social structure = violence
  3. Synchronisation for identity
10. Violence internalised
  1. Fanon = oppressed = personal conflicts and turmoil
  2. Opressed = conditions for the destruction of racism
The identity dynamics of racism
1. Blackness essesntialised
  1. Blackness = essential and determining quality of identity
  2. Not the meaning the person makes for himself but the pre - existing one that leaves impression
  3. Blackness functions as a fixed essence in speech and appearance
2. Qualifying, categorising, problematising the racial subject
  1. Racist thinking defines individuals based on race, associations, values etc of that race
  2. Prejudicial terms = idealise dominant class while problimitising dominated class
  3. Black/ gay etc = understood through terms of categorical groupings
3. How Whiteness defines Blackness
  1. Superiority of Whiteness requires the systemic devaluation of Blacks
  2. Neagtive Black & Positive white = binary logic
  3. Blackness is based on not being White
Identity development in oppressive contexts
1. Stages of marginal identity
  1. Stage 1 = capitulation = identify with aggressor
  2. Stage 2 = revitalisation = reacts towards powerful dominance (flight)
  3. Stage 3 = radicalisation = committed to radical social change (fight)
2. The dynamics of cultural 'in - betweenity'
  1. The grey area where all 3 stages of marginal identity overlap
  2. When overlap = influence on each other = change
Critiques of Fanon
1. Sexism: black woman and white man & black man and white woman
2. Representing colonial relationship as one of complete dominance and control
3. Essentialist & static categories

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Frantz Fanon and Racial Identity in Post - Colonial Contexts

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