https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n46.08
Matthieu Renault
Université Paris 8, France
matthieu.renault@gmail.com
Abstract:
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex display numerous theoretical and critical affinities. These stem from the appropriations and translations which both works operated in relation to the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, with a view to the conceptual apprehension of relations of gender (man/woman) and race (White/Black). From this starting-point, what is engaged is a comprehensive dialogue on the questions of the body (gendered, racialised), love, and violence. However even more than these affinities, what we can identify is the extent of the influence of Beauvoir’s writings on Fanon. If this aspect has for the moment come in for very little emphasis and even less study, it is because Fanon never quotes Beauvoir’s theses and would even appear to have striven to hide any intellectual filiation. We need to understand the causes of such a “disappearance”, not only to comprehend Fanon’s work, but also so as to understand their shared source, which is also, to a certain degree, a shared birth, that of feminism and anti-colonialism in the years following the Second World.
Keywords: Fanon, Beauvoir, gender relations, race relations, anti-colonialism.
