SOCI2070 Week 4 (Zoom tutorial) by Amanda Wise

Class Discussion

1. How can Frantz Fanon's essay on 'The Fact of Blackness' [required reading] be used to analyse the development of racism in colonial societies?

2. What does Fanon's embodied, psychoanalytic approach to the experience of blackness add to Gilroy and Hall's artguments advanced last week, about the social construction and historicity of race?

3. Discuss the following Fanon quotes (page 84 of reading):

"the 'white man has woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories'?

....'Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema."

"On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I
took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, anexcision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization.
All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together." (page 85)

4. Think of an example where an 'intersectional' analysis casts more nuanced light on understanding racism.

5. Discuss an example of 'everyday racism' (Philomena Essed) and use Essed's model to explain how you can to identify it as such

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