The post - colonial literature in The black cat Assignment

Assignment on the post colonial literature

M.A. English -Paper no. 11 -The Post -Colonial literature

●Semester - 3
Presented by Prinjal Shiya
Email id. prinjal00123@gmail.com
Batch no.: 2018 to 2020
Department of English- Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
●Submitted to : Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad, Head of the Department, -Department of English MKBU.

     ◆Question:- Note on "The Black skins and white masks."

     He was an intellectual fellow political radical, existentialist humanist; he dealt with social, cultural, political problems. He supported the Algerian war of independence from France, and was also a member of the Algerian national liberation front. The life and works of Frantz fanon have inspired anti-colonial national liberation movements in Palestine, Sir Lanka, and the U.S .He served in the French army. He studied Medicine. He was a psychiatrist.Black Skin, White Masks is certainly an amazing engagement with the fate of the black individual in society. The book deals with various questions and dilemmas faced by all humans. Its power lies in the fact that it remains surprisingly optimistic in spite of its serious subject matter. Fanon recognizes the problems faced by the former colonised and is quite aware of the psychologically draining position that he/she occupies.Fanon quotes Adler and Hegel and talks the points, they gave. Fanon relates their ideas with blacks of Martinique. He gives argument and reason of their internal fight,

     “In place of honest hatred was a false smile which gave blacks nothing to fight against. All they could do was bite their tongue and smile back… still remaining unequal.” The last chapter of this book “By way of conclusion” is, as the title suggests, a conclusion. In this chapter he talks about some solution which can try to remove this inequality and injustice between blacks and whites. Fanon suggests forgetting past which leads them to superiority and inferiority complexes. White people may feel guilty for their inhuman ancestors and blacks may feel inferior than whites because of their past as a slave. And it also raises hatred towards whites. So, Fanon rightly says, not to be prisoners of the past, ‘let the dead bury the dead’. He proves his views with examples of Indo-china war history.

     Friends, I think in France in the year of 1952, Frantz Omar fanon wrote his first book,’ Black Skin, White Masks.’ The book is an analysis of the negative psychology-cal impact of colonial subjugation upon black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon. Its title was “Essay on the Desalination of the Black” It was rejected and fanon published it as a book.Black Skin, White Masks is a unique work of art. It deals with many aspects like a man’s search for identity race prejudice that prevails all over the world and in our century too. The whites addressed the third world people as others they wanted to civilize to others them humiliated others. They treated us as if we were ignorant ant and animal’s non white means not human but savage-this is what they believed. Black always tried to be white they did not respect their culture but ram madly after white culture they were made o believe themselves to be inferior to the colonizers. The colonizers believed to be far.

“The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behaves in accordance with a neurotic orientation.” Essentially the Negro is born into a hopeless situation. In this context, the black man will never be normal, but always an inborn no, a preborn human of abnormality. "Let me add only that in the psychological sphere the abnormal man is he who demands, who appeals, who begs." Fanon invokes Freud; however the Oedipus complex is a luxury for the white man.The colonized women look down on their own. Race and deep down won’t to be white. In “The Bluest eye” of “Tony Morrison” we find a black desire of white woman.

    There are two such women: the Negros and the mulatto. The first has only one possibility and one concern: to turn white. The second wants not only to turn white but also to avoid slipping back. What indeed could be more illogical then a mulatto woman’s acceptance of a Negro husbands? For the understood once and for all that it is a question of saving the race.Why should people fear of being as a black? Here the white man repressed the Homosexuality and their strange hang ups about black man’s penises more generally, black man are viewed as a bodies which makes them seems like mindless, violence, sexual, animal beings. All the bad meaning that the word “Black” had even before Europeans set foot in black Africa.Black Skin White Mask is a sociological study of the psychology of racism and dehumanization inherent to colonial domination. Fanon describes that Black people experience in the White world Fanon talks about, self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin, and embraced the culture of the Mother Country. He also talks about the inferiority complex in the mind of the Black subject.The rejection of the master narrative of western imperialism in which the colonial other is not only subordinate and marginalized but in effect deleted as agency and its replacement by counter narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back in to a world history written by Europeans.

      The subaltern has become a standard way to designate the colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourse and internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse; “subaltern” is the Latin term for “under” and “ other”. A recurrent topic of debate is now, and to what extent a subaltern subject, writing in a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resistance against rather than of compliance with the very discourse that has created its subordinate identity.

    The major element in the postcolonial agenda is to be disestablishing Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers.And in present time we are analyzing the book of Fanon ‘Black skin, White Mask’ this book divided into many chapters. Each chapter has its own importance. They deal with the psychological aspect. It includes the condition of Black people and their mentality.

       Frantz Fanon was influenced by many thinkers and traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lacan, Negritude and Marxism. He was influenced by Aime Cesaire, a leader of the negritude movement, was a teacher and mentor to fanon on the island of Martinique. Fanon referred to Cesaire’s writings his own work. He quoted, for example, his teacher at length in “They lived experience of the Black man “ a heavily anthologized essay form Black Skin, White Masks.

   ◆Conclusion

    I summarise my topics with the question, Why people think that white people are fair and good and black are bad ?

                              Thank you!