Fanon revisited: Race gender and coloniality vis-à-vis skin colour

Abstract

Under colonialism, the mirror of the black-white binary has been shattered by white colonials consorting with black and indigenous women. By privileging lighter-skinned mixed-race groups, colonialists established a hierarchy that linked skin colour to economic and social class. Therefore, we argue that to understand the texts of Frantz Fanon and Mayotte Capécia requires analytical tools that resist seeing the world in black or white. Our reading of Fanon seeks to broaden the scope of analysis of these texts by looking at them as works standing at the crossroads where issues of race, colour, gender, class, and power converge. Blaming women absolves men from the painful reality that they are also partners in this construction. As two black women, we have been fascinated by the depth of Fanon's understanding of the mechanisms and ideology of colonial oppression. However, the way Fanon deals with the desire of the black man to be whitened by his association to a white woman is very different from a reverse situation between a black woman and a white man. Both seek their redemption by the association to whiteness-lightness.