Négropolitains and Nuyorícans: Metropolitan Racialization in Frantz Fanon and Piri Thomas

Abstract

I would like to begin with two scenes that allude to a common experience for Antillean intracolonial migrants. The first passage comes from the well-known scene in Franz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs in which a French boy expresses fear when he confronts Fanon’s blackness. I would like to focus however, on the mother’s comment to explain her son’s irrational behavior by vindicating metropolitan ignorance about the civilization of French colonials (Fanon 1952, 91, 2008, 93). The mother refers to the fact that her child is not aware of Fanon’s status as a French citizen who comes from one of France’s old colonies. In this same scene, Fanon’s narrative voice stresses that even after Martinique had become a department of France in 1946, mainstream and white French citizens seem to be fairly ignorant about the internal diversity of their own society. More ironic however, is the implication of the motherchild behavior, since in her intervention the mother seems to suggest that only colonial immigrants can explain the presence of blackness in the French society of the 1950s. Fanon reflects about the problematic epidermal visibility of his blackness in the context of the invisibility of his condition as a colonial Antillean migrant and a French citizen.