By appropriating what is said in Black Skin, White Masks — It can be generalized that those who are colonized, have “no culture, no civilisation, no ‘long historical past’” (34) and it is the master’s or colonizer’s language that “is the key that can opens doors” (38). Stephen Dedalus faces a similar dilemma that eventually [...]
Entries Tagged as 'black skin white masks'
Stephen’s Voice: The Irish in Me
November 12, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
Tags: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man·black skin white masks·Kelvin Zhong·Language struggles
Is the hierarchy of language everything?
November 12, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
There is a clear hierarchy of languages revealed in Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’. When he tells of the Antilleans’ desire to learn French French (as if there was a definitive dialect), even as Senagalese try to speak like native Antilleans, the hierarchy becomes really stark and not a little funny. Sad, perhaps, but funny [...]
On Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks
November 12, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
As I was reading Fanon’s article, what instantly sprang to mind was Hegel’s ‘master-slave’ dialectics. The black man has internalized what Chateerjee terms as the ‘rule of colonial difference’ and understands his own position in relation to white man and his authority and superiority. I agree with what Fanon has pointed out about the nature [...]
Tags: black skin white masks·Fanon·Peiyi
The roles played in Empire
November 11, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
As I was reading Fanon’s article, I realized that the colonial enterprise only worked as well as it did was because both sides (colonized and colonizer) acknowledged their respective roles and performed them accordingly, especially when it comes to upholding the rules of language. It is only through the modernist writings that we have encountered [...]
Tags: Asya Kames·black skin white masks·Frantz Fanon·role of language
language and mimicry
November 11, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized
To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. Rather more than a year ago in Lyon, I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between [...]
Tags: black skin white masks·Caroline Sng·Frantz Fanon·homi bhabha·mimicry
