This piece argues that Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks inscribes the social and psychological experience of the African Diaspora within the conceptual purview of the western sciences by the means of psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts. The upshots of Fanon’s goal are twofold. Its first implication is that in employing psychoanalytical and philosophical lingo, Fanon commits to delineating a distinct tenet of self-determination for the African Diaspora. Such tenet of self-determination consists in a set of norms, beliefs, socio-cultural, and political practices. Secondly, besides the stated goal in the Introduction, namely to ‘liberate the black individual from herself,’ Fanon is attempting to alter the European perception of black communities as sexual and biological threats. Accordingly, this piece concludes that Fanon’s successful inscription of the psychological and lived experiences of the African Diaspora in the western sciences, via his psychoanalytical and philosophical rendition, is hampered by the European perception of black bodies which prevents their complete scientific conceptualization.

The present essay examines three apparent contradictions to arise in Fanon’s work regarding his operative critique of religion, ontology, and theory of truth. I review some of the prevailing evaluations of these apparent contradictions, and then argue that said interpretations of Fanon do not stand up to close textual and historical scrutiny. I then dissolve the aforementioned apparent contradictions and provide more adequate approaches to interpreting their theoretical significance in such a way as to highlight the internal coherence and force of Fanon’s philosophical vision.

While there has been significant literature concerning the relationship between Frantz Fanon and European philosophy; particularly, Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and existentialism, there has been little work addressing the influence of Aimé Césaire to Fanon’s work. In this essay we argue that Césaire’s ethical sensibility concerning freedom and transformation had a major role in shaping Fanon’s thought. We suggest that Césaire’s work cannot be reduced to an essentialist reading of blackness, or a retrograde form of African nativism. Rather, we argue his anti-colonial philosophy can be understood as an “ethics of acceptance” that seeks to journey to the inward of human consciousness in order to transcend the black’s negative self-concept under colonialism. Contrasting Césaire’s ethics of acceptance, we trace Fanon’s external ethics of confrontation through his reading of Césaire, and also the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In doing so, we argue that Fanon departs from Césaire not based on the latter’s conception of blackness, or négritude, but rather his ethics of acceptance.

Readers of C.L.R. James are familiar with the thinker’s careful reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick in his text Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. In that work James proposes that Melville exposes the foundations of societal level fascism as exemplified by the monomaniacal purpose of Ahab. The purpose of this effort is to push further into the concept of societal division as exemplified by Moby-Dick by proposing that Melville is taking on the discourse of color (black vs. white) and its relationship to ontological value (bad vs. good) by imploding the internal logic of Plato’s Phaedrus. What concerns this project is the relationship between the phenotypic “blackness” of the characters of African descent in Moby-Dick and ways in which Melville endeavors to destabilize skin color in the western imaginary as a means to correct the negative consequences of this flattening of the hierarchical nature of society on the part of Ahab.