The short time of the seminar however will only allow us to rapidly gloss this text and I must leave students to follow these possibilities up in their own time if they are sufficiently interested.
However, I can assure you that should you do so it will be a very rewarding journey into the rich archive available to us today in terms of cultural history and the overlap between contemporary art and contemporary politics.
The Fanon text seems in a way dated because of some its terminology and because of the way its positions seem so graphically expressed in terms of a polarised racial milieu.
What is really rewarding however is to hear how this brilliant young man manages to think racial tensions in terms of cultural and psychological influences rather than any 'essential' or 'biological' argument.
In his intelligent analysis of extremely sensitive and volatile political tensions Fanon explains and explicates the complexities of the black subject in a postcolonial era, i.e. as someone now inhabiting both 'white' and black' fields of experience and attempting to negotiate this while avoiding neuroses.
Part of Fanon's technique is an ironic tone which sometimes make his scathing examples sound like his own opinions when in fact he is expressing commonly held position which he is trying to break down by asking it to face up to its underlying delusions and fears which propagate misguided images of The Other. and in many respects his essay is aimed at the 'negrophobic' white audience, asking it to rationalise its own fears and images of racial difference.
As a 20th century thinker it is significant that much of Fanon's argument is aimed at technologised media (e.g. children's comics) as a significant cultural influence on the development of the subject.
His application of Freudian psychoanalysis is innovative and creative (as was Lacan's last week) and, in carving his own method from Freud's principles he artfully appropriates psychoanalysis for non-European aims. In the process he simultaneously negates and effectively disgraces Jung as a Euro-centric racist.
We will do our best to gloss the text and illustrate these points in the time available. I realise it is a long and difficult text but the many points it raises profound and useful to compare with today's continuing debates and tensions regarding multi-culture, nation-ality, and the postcolonial Subject.
We can also at least introduce the themes in the films referred to above and see if it is effective to compare Fanon's text with that of Olaudah Equiano (see below)
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