BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
29 September 2020
The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is a partner of the first ever Polish edition of Frantz Fanon’s seminal work ‘Black Skin, White Masks’.
Originally published in 1952, the book is among the key intellectual contributions to anti-racism and critical race theory. It has had a major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and Black rights movements around the world.
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925-1961) was a physician and psychiatrist as well as a radical humanist who inspired liberation movements across the world. Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, he enlisted in the anti-Nazi Free French army during World War II. In the 1950s he partook in the anti-colonial movement in Algeria and died in the USA in 1961.
In the final passages of the book, Fanon wrote: ‘Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.’
In the words of Leonardio Custodio, writing on the London School of Economics and Political Science web page: ‘Frantz Fanon’s classic Black Skin, White Masks is a book of enduring relevance. Fanon’s self-reflexive, philosophical, poetic, literary, arguably clinical and, above all, political analysis is still a powerhouse. It remains a fundamental part of the contemporary constellation of intellectual and activist struggles and discourses working to denounce and contest the effects of racism on the lives and minds of black people and people of colour.’
The first Polish edition of ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, translated by Urszula Kropiwiec, was published by Karakter publishing house and supported by the French Institute in Warsaw.
