Fanon's Ontology

This paper will examine Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (1951) for its singular hypothesis regarding the ontology of the colonized as radical negativity. Critical scholarship on this book tend to focus on Fanon’s discussion of the psychological effects of colonialism on the colonized’s psyche – the colonized’s “dependency complex” or futile struggles to identify as white and failing which the colonized’s eventual sinking into depression and neurosis. Accordingly, what gets debated most is the colonized’s ability to reclaim an identity for itself that is free from colonial neurosis. I will however move away from reading Fanon’s text as an account of conflict between identities – white versus black – and focus more on what I claim to be Fanon’s most significant contribution to the study of colonialism, namely, conceiving colonialism less in terms of social justice and identity politics and more in relation to ontology.