Black Skin, White Masks

Penguin Modern Classics

By: Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox - translator

Narrated by: Theo Solomon

Brought to you by Penguin.

Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker.

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis

'Fanon is our contemporary ... In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah Levy

'So hard to put down ... a brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair' The New York Times Book Review

© Frantz Fanon 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critic reviews

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism (Angela Davis)

Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism, and how some of us have been staged in its psychodrama (Deborah Levy)

A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images. . . It is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellectual, who makes the book so hard to put down (Robert Coles)

Interesting

Interesting how Fanon analyzes the experience of black man and women. The analysis applies up to today’s experience of inhabiting a black body.