Fanon Flashcards
(31 cards)
Frantz Fanon
Anticolonial psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique. His works examine the psychological effects of racism and colonialism, emphasizing liberation through radical transformation, not gradual reform.
Historical Change (Fanon’s View)
Driven by violent rupture, not evolutionary progress. Colonialism dehumanizes both colonized and colonizer; liberation comes not through persuasion or reform but through revolution and radical action.
Colonialism
A violent, racist, and dehumanizing system that imposes material and psychological domination. It divides the world into colonizer and colonized, light and dark, civilized and savage.
Decolonization
Not a peaceful negotiation, but a violent, cleansing process of ending colonial rule. Fanon insists liberation must match the violence that established colonial domination.
Manichaean World
Fanon’s description of colonial society: a stark division between good/evil, white/black, colonizer/colonized. Reinforces racist binaries that structure colonial domination.
National Bourgeoisie
The educated elite of colonized nations who replace colonizers post-independence but replicate colonial structures. Fanon sees them as a major barrier to true liberation and progress.
Lumpenproletariat
The marginalized, criminalized underclass (e.g. beggars, delinquents) whom Fanon identifies as the most revolutionary group in urban colonial settings.
Peasant Masses
The largest, rural class in colonized nations. Fanon argues they are the most revolutionary force, capable of true decolonization when organized politically.
Alienation
The psychological estrangement experienced by colonized people, especially Black individuals, who are forced to see themselves through the lens of whiteness.
Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon’s first major work. Analyzes how colonialism produces racial inferiority complexes and internalized whiteness in Black individuals, especially through language, desire, and the body.
The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon’s final work. Combines revolutionary theory with psychiatric case studies to argue for violent decolonization, national culture, and a new form of humanity.
Violence (Fanon)
A necessary and liberating force. Violence breaks the colonial order and restores dignity to the oppressed. It is both political and psychological, undoing years of internalized inferiority.
Colonized Intellectual
Torn between two worlds—colonial education and native identity. Initially mimics the colonizer’s worldview, but must undergo radical transformation to truly support national liberation.
National Culture
Not a return to pre-colonial past but emerges through struggle. Fanon argues culture is created in motion, through revolutionary praxis—not frozen traditions.
Negritude
A literary-political movement celebrating Black identity. Fanon critiques its mysticism and essentialism, arguing it fails to engage with present material realities.
Historical Progress
According to Fanon, true progress comes through rupture, not continuity. Liberation requires creating a “new man” by breaking from colonial and European models of humanity.
Psychoanalysis
Used by Fanon to explore the psychological impact of colonialism. He critiques Eurocentric psychoanalysis for its failure to understand Black experience shaped by racism.
Inferiority Complex
A psychological condition caused not by childhood trauma (contra Mannoni), but by systemic racism and colonialism. Internalized by colonized people as racial self-hatred.
Negrophobia
Anti-Black fear and loathing. Fanon argues this “phobia” is rooted in colonial sexual fears and social structures, not mere individual psychology.
Jean-Paul Sartre
French existentialist who influenced Fanon. Sartre supported Negritude but also saw it as a stage to be “gotten over”—a claim Fanon critiqued as patronizing.
G.W.F. Hegel
German philosopher whose master-slave dialectic influenced Fanon. Fanon revises it to show that in colonialism, the slave never receives recognition as a full subject.
Master-Slave Dialectic
A Hegelian concept where self-consciousness arises through recognition. Fanon argues that the colonial master denies this recognition, arresting the colonized’s development.
National Consciousness
The collective political awakening of a people. Fanon believes this is the only path to authentic liberation and cultural creation after colonial rule.
Psychopathology of Colonization
Fanon links colonial violence to psychological disorders in both colonizer and colonized. He draws on psychiatric case studies to show widespread trauma.
