The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean

Abstract

‘The Fact of Blackness’, the fifth chapter of Martinican psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, maps the journey of a black French Caribbean man coming to terms with anti-black racism as a disabling state of being. Writing in the first person, Fanon makes it clear that white French prejudices against Jews, ‘cripples’ and blacks each has unique historical trajectories, with consequently different lived experiences of dispossession. A moment of public humiliation, when a white child points at him and says, ‘Mama, look at the Negro! I’m frightened!’, leads Fanon to the realisation that his skin colour and other ‘black’ phenotypic characteristics have been alienated from and turned against him. He is: