As 21st century "Fanonism” appears more eager than ever to embrace Black Skin, White Masks as the critical vademecum of lived experiences of blackness across nations and periods, Lydie Moudileno will reiterate the need to situate Fanon’s theories in the specific context of their production, in this case 1950s France. Grounded in the history of migration generated by the French Empire and drawing attention to the distinction between subjects from the old American colonies and those from SubSaharan Africa, her presentation will argue that, beyond the binaries evident in Fanon’s analysis of colonial subjugation, anti-blackness, and alienation, Fanon's text draws on the historical heterogeneity of the “black population” in France in the early 1950s, surreptitiously pointing to a range of different groups, situations and bodies within the black community in the Metropole. Specifically, it will re-read Fanon’s powerful assertion in Black Skin, White Masks—"The Black man has two dimensions: One with his fellows, the other with the white man”—against the background of the racial and social divisions which determined the conditions of a présence africaine in postwar France.
Nora Alter will focus on Isaac Julien and Mark Nash’s 1995 film Black Skin, White Mask and, in particular, on the translation of Fanon’s seminal text: linguistically (French to English), temporally (1950s to 1990s), culturally (French anti-colonial to British Cultural Studies) and medially (from written text to audio-visual moving image). In the 1990s Fanon was a touchstone figure for British cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and Homi K. Bhabha, who drew on and expanded Fanon’s theorization of the postcolonial subject. In the film their voices are placed in dialogue with Fanon’s text—a text that already contains a plurality of voices. Julien and Nash’s work thus stages a conversation that moves from Martinique to France to Algeria to 1990s Britain.
Jarrod Hayes will offer a reading of Frantz Fanon’s eponymous masks at the intersection between race and sexuality. In the second chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” Fanon harshly criticizes Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martiniquan Woman, a first-person narrative of a female character in a sexual relationship with a French naval officer that was only recently brought back to critical attention by feminist Caribbeanists. While feminists were rereading Capécia, Fanon was becoming an ever-more-important pre-text for postcolonial theory, particularly in the realm of the critical study of race in the work of scholars like Homi K. Bhabha and Kobena Mercer, the second of whom might also be considered an important queer theorist. Hayes will explore what bringing these two trends—separate until now—back together might contribute to the now ample body of Fanon criticism. In particular, he will consider the orgies and masked balls depicted by Louisiana white Creole writer Sidonie de La Houssaye in her four-volume Quadroons of New Orleans. Set in the 1820s and 30s and published in the 1890s, these novels stage the institution of plaçage (or contractual relationships between white men and Creole women of color) and the infamous "quadroon balls" that served as their prelude. While de La Houssaye has attracted the recent attention of literary critics (some of whom read her in light of Fanon), no one has yet highlighted the parallels between her and Capécia, much less argued that both women writers theorize a very Fanonian mask of race, in spite of Fanon’s condemnation of the more recent writer. Hayes will make precisely this argument.
Finally, emphasizing that Fanon had thought to introduce the racialization of the subject into an official theoretical submission, Gayatri Spivak will argue that his method was to make the experience of being racialized utterly compelling, move on to claim the subjectship of phenomenological speculation, performing the contradiction implicit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind in a few pages, and suggest, in his conclusion, an open horizon for Hegel’s closed system. Fanon's text is a teaching text and we must teach ourselves how to read it as the sublation of Euro-local theory.