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allisonjpmiller 's review for:
Black Skin, White Masks
by Frantz Fanon
Read for a grad theory class. Many searing passages - I bookmarked and highlighted a lot, even as I cringed my way through his botched "analysis" of women and head-scratchingly weird suggestions about homosexuality. I get that Fanon's intention was to make room in psychoanalytic theory for the kinds of lives, circumstances, and backward realities that Lacan and Freud had, up till that point, ignored. And I find his ideas about reconstruction of the self fascinating - in particular, the notion that environment forms the ego and a break/descent from the world, which fails to correspond to individual experience, is necessary at some point in order to arrive at self-consciousness. I just wish he'd granted women the same psychological complexity as men in his assessment.