Video and Podcast Resources On Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks

nine lectures on this excellent complex work of analysis

One of the philosophers whose work I long ago incorporated into my recurring classes on Existentialism is the West Indian philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. He authored several books, but the one that I have my students read a number of chapters from is his early work Black Skin White Masks. It is an excellent and insightful piece of analysis of how conceptions, power structures, and lived experiences, centered by race but also sexuality, language, politics, and colonialism, play themselves out.

One reason to incorporate Fanon into Existentialism classes is to show my students the reality that the loose movement we call Existentialism wasn’t entirely an affair of white European men. That’s clearly not the case, for anyone who has studied widely within it, and even if it were the case, I don’t see that as a reason to discount it. But it does help to address a common complaint I get from overzealous students on occasion.

A better reason to read Fanon is that he is an author who really represents a culmination of a number of strains of thought, and who integrates them thoughtfully and well in his works. If you read Black Skin White Masks, you’ll see him critically engaging a number of psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, explaining judiciously where there ideas work and where they fall short. He also understands how to use phenomenological approaches effectively, and is keenly attentive to language and to cultural products. He has a solid philosophical background, and again incorporates thinkers, like Hegel for instance, without buy into their ideas wholesale.

His approach to race is quite complex, and that, to me is a really strong suit of his works. He rejects any simple solutions or criticisms, and looks forward to a time he doesn’t inhabit (and we still don’t), where the many issues and problems can be productively worked through. Race isn’t just a social construct, nor is it something with a basis in actual science, but it is something manifesting within bodies, in language, political structures and action, and within psyches.

He’s also an excellent writer, stylistically, which fortunately does come through in the translations of the work. That’s always a plus.

I created a series of core concept videos working through key ideas of Black Skin White Masks in front of my chalkboard, and then, as I usually do, came back to those and turned those into Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes that people could listen to or download. Here are links to all of those

• The Overall Approach And Argument - watch video | listen to podcast

• Particularity And Universality - watch video | listen to podcast

• What Language Reveals - watch video | listen to podcast

• Woman And Man, White And Color - watch video | listen to podcast

• Psychoanalysis, Racism, And Culture - watch video | listen to podcast

• Negrophobia, Nature, And Sexuality - watch video | listen to podcast

• Parallels Between Antisemitism And Anti-Black Racism - watch video | listen to podcast

• Past, Future, And Action - watch video | listen to podcast

• The Negro And Hegel - watch video | listen to podcast

There you have them. Nine lectures in video and podcast formats on this great first main work by Frantz Fanon. Later on down the line, if I can find the time, I may create other sets of lectures on some of his other works as well.