The Look, the Shame, and the Praxis: Sartrean Phenomenology and Fanonian Decolonization in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth
Abstract
This paper argues that Frantz Fanon's relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre is one of critical transformation rather than discipleship. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon adopts Sartre's phenomenology of the look and shame to describe racial alienation, while exposing the limits of Sartre's universalism for the colonial context. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon absorbs Sartre's dialectical reason to theorize decolonization as collective praxis. The trajectory from the earlier to the later text represents Fanon's transformation of Sartrean thought from a phenomenology of individual consciousness into a dialectic of collective liberation—a "new humanism" that fulfills Sartre's project by surpassing it.
Research Question
How does Frantz Fanon critically appropriate, revise, and ultimately transform Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology of the look and existentialist theory of consciousness—from Being and Nothingness through the Critique of Dialectical Reason—to articulate a theory of racial alienation and decolonial praxis in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth?
Hypothesis
It is hypothesized that Fanon's relationship to Sartre is not one of passive discipleship but of critical appropriation. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon adopts Sartre's phenomenological vocabulary—the look, shame, bad faith, the Other—to describe the racialized subject's alienation, but exposes the inadequacy of Sartre's universalism for the colonial context, particularly in his critique of Orphée noir. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon moves beyond existential phenomenology altogether, absorbing Sartre's later dialectical reason to theorize decolonization as praxis. The trajectory from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth thus represents Fanon's transformation of Sartrean thought from a phenomenology of individual consciousness into a dialectic of collective liberation—a "new humanism" that fulfills Sartre's project by surpassing it.
Introduction: The Sartre–Fanon Problem
The intellectual relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon is one of the most consequential in twentieth-century postcolonial thought. Yet, as Mathieu Courville argues, the critical tendency to read postcolonial theory's genealogy through Michel Foucault has obscured the more foundational Fanon–Sartre connection (Courville 216). Fanon's engagement with Sartre spans his entire career, from the phenomenological analysis of racial shame in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to the dialectical theory of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
This paper argues that Fanon's relationship to Sartre is one of critical appropriation and transformation. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon adopts Sartre's phenomenological vocabulary—the look, shame, bad faith, the Other—to describe the racialized subject's alienation, but exposes the inadequacy of Sartre's universalism for the colonial context. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon moves beyond existential phenomenology altogether, absorbing Sartre's later dialectical reason to theorize decolonization as collective praxis. The trajectory from the earlier to the later text thus represents Fanon's transformation of Sartrean thought from a phenomenology of individual consciousness into a dialectic of collective liberation—a "new humanism" that fulfills Sartre's project by surpassing it.
The paper proceeds in three movements. The first section examines Sartre's phenomenology of the look and Fanon's adaptation of it in Black Skin, White Masks, drawing on David Mitchell's analysis of shame and Lou Turner's account of Sartre's theory of consciousness. The second section turns to Fanon's critique of Sartre's universalism, particularly through the lens of Bryan Cheyette's study of Fanon's engagement with Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew. The third section examines Fanon's absorption of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason in The Wretched of the Earth, following Ben Etherington's account of the dialectical framework that structures Fanon's theory of decolonization.
The Phenomenology of the Racial Gaze
Sartre's account of the look in Being and Nothingness (1943) provides the phenomenological foundation for Fanon's analysis of racial alienation. For Sartre, the look of the Other objectifies the subject, transforming it from a free transcendence into a fixed object. "I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other," Sartre writes, and shame is "the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging" (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 261, 222). David Mitchell argues that shame is characterized by three features: it is a recognition of self, it is immediate and pre-reflective, and it occurs before somebody (Mitchell 353). The problem, as Mitchell formulates it, is how shame can involve both a recognition of self and be pre-reflective—how the self can be the locus of an original shame if the self only arises in reflective consciousness (Mitchell 354). Sartre's solution lies in the lived body: in absorbed activity, the body is not an object of knowledge but is co-extensive with the world. The look of the Other, intimated rather than perceived thematically, causes a collapse of this absorbed engagement, revealing the self as an object (Mitchell 356–358).
Fanon appropriates this phenomenology in Black Skin, White Masks to describe the racialized subject's experience. The famous scene on the train—"Look, a Negro ... Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!" (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 111–112)—enacts precisely the Sartrean structure of the look. Fanon describes being "fixed" by the gaze of the white child, his self "burst apart," his body suddenly revealed as an object of fear and revulsion. Mitchell argues that this is the moment when Fanon's stable sense of self, protecting him from primary shame, is shattered; "some new aspect of himself is both revealed and alienated from him" (Mitchell 361). The racialized look re-awakens the primary shame that ordinary social existence had repressed.
But Fanon's appropriation of Sartre is not merely derivative. Turner argues that Fanon recapitulates Sartre's critique of Husserl in Transcendence of the Ego, but racializes it (Turner 47). Sartre had argued that the ego is not a constituent of consciousness but a transcendent object; Fanon shows how the racialized ego is determined from without, by a "historical-epidermal schema" (Turner 48). The black subject's ego exists "at the unreflected level of 'a consciousness without a me'" (Turner 48). The racialized ego is not merely a social construct in the abstract; it is a historical artifact that occludes the spontaneity of consciousness. Fanon's phenomenology of race thus reveals what Sartre's analysis of the look had only implied: that the look is not neutral but is structured by historical and racial hierarchies.
Mitchell traces the responses to racialized shame that Fanon describes: first, attempting to assert oneself as a "BLACK MAN"; second, seeking invisibility; third, rationalizing the world and demonstrating one's equality with the white man; fourth, embracing unreason and the "magical Negro culture" of negritude; and finally, violence (Mitchell 361–363). None of these responses resolves the cycle of shame, because each re-inscribes the racialized subject within the very structures that produce shame. What Fanon's analysis reveals is the insufficiency of the Sartrean framework: Sartre's phenomenology of the look can describe the structure of racial objectification, but it cannot prescribe a way out of it. The way out requires a move beyond phenomenology itself—toward the dialectic.
The Limits of Existentialism
Fanon's engagement with Sartre is not merely philosophical but personal and political. Cheyette's study of Fanon's reading of Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) reveals the anxiety of influence that structures Black Skin, White Masks (Cheyette 7). Fanon described Sartre's text as containing "some of the finest [pages] that I have ever read," yet his relation to it was not one of straightforward admiration (Cheyette 7). Fanon drew on Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitism to argue, against Octave Mannoni, that colonial racism is no different from any other racism: "Anti-Semitism hits me head on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man" (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 89). The "racial distribution of guilt"—the chain in which "the Frenchman does not like the Jew, who does not like the Arab, who does not like the Negro"—is Fanon's Sartrean inheritance (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 103).
Yet Fanon also resists Sartre's too-easy assimilation of black and Jewish experience. Cheyette argues that Black Skin, White Masks contains "two incommensurable narratives" concerning blacks and Jews, revolving around the uncertainty of whether Jews should be regarded as "black" or "white" (Cheyette 8). For Fanon, the Jew can be "unknown in his Jewishness," can "go unnoticed," whereas the black cannot: "I am over-determined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance" (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 115–116). The black body is visible, inescapable, irreducible to universal reason. Sartre's universalism—his claim that "there is only one Truth"—cannot account for this bodily particularity (qtd. in Cheyette 10). Fanon thus affirms the particularity of black experience against Sartre's universalizing dialectic.
This critique extends to Sartre's Orphée noir (1948), his preface to Senghor's anthology of negritude poetry. Fanon famously accused Sartre of having "destroyed black zeal" by subordinating negritude to a Hegelian dialectic in which black particularity is merely a moment to be surpassed (Cheyette 8). As Cheyette argues, Fanon "feared the too easy universalisation of the victims of modernity" (Cheyette 11). The particularity of black suffering, grounded in the body, cannot be dialectically transcended without remainder. Fanon's relation to Sartre is thus characterized by what Cheyette calls an "uneasy intimacy": he draws on Sartre's critique of racism while resisting his universalizing tendencies (Cheyette 9).
What emerges from Black Skin, White Masks is a doubled critique. On the one hand, Fanon uses Sartre's phenomenology to describe racial alienation more powerfully than Sartre himself could. On the other hand, he exposes the limits of Sartrean existentialism: its inability to theorize the collective, historical, and material dimensions of racial oppression. The look, as Sartre describes it, is a structure of individual consciousness; but racialized looking is a structure of colonial power. To theorize decolonization, Fanon must move beyond the phenomenology of the individual subject toward a dialectic of collective praxis.
From Phenomenology to Dialectic
The publication of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960 marked a decisive turning point in Fanon's intellectual trajectory. Etherington argues that the Critique had a "decisive impact" on the composition of The Wretched of the Earth, and that Fanon "received from Sartre's work a conception of reason as immanent in social revolution, and, with it, the means to distinguish true from false decolonization" (Etherington 151–152). The shift from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth is thus not merely a shift in subject matter—from racial alienation to decolonization—but a shift in philosophical framework: from existential phenomenology to dialectical reason.
Sartre's Critique develops a theory of "practico-inert" systems and "groups-in-fusion." The practico-inert is the material order that humans create through their praxis, which then comes to determine their possibilities. Sartre writes that the field of the practico-inert is the universe of anti-praxis; the material world, once shaped by human labor, turns back upon its makers as an alien force. The colonial world is precisely such a practico-inert system: a "compartmentalized world" in which colonizer and colonized are "two different species" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 29–30). Fanon describes the colonial city with its "well-fed town" of the colonizer and its "starved town" of the colonized, each zone reproducing the material conditions of its inhabitants (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 30). Decolonization, for Fanon, is the negation of this practico-inert through the formation of a "group-in-fusion"—a collective subject constituted through revolutionary praxis. As Sartre defines it, the group-in-fusion is "the reciprocal recognition of the same object by several people" (Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason 1: 374); it emerges when serial individuals discover a common project in the face of a common threat.
Etherington argues that Fanon's account of decolonization is structured by this Sartrean framework. The colonized are "serial" beings, separated from one another by the colonial practico-inert; anticolonial violence constitutes them as a "group-in-fusion" that totalizes itself through common praxis. "The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence," Fanon writes. "This praxis enlightens the agent because it indicates to him the means and end" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 68). The language of "praxis" and "enlightenment" here is Sartrean: it is not the a priori enlightenment of the French Revolution but the immanent enlightenment of collective action, in which the group becomes conscious of its project through the act of realizing it. Fanon describes this as a "totalizing" process: "This violent praxis is totalizing, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence surging up in reaction to the first violence of the colonialist" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 73). The group recognizes itself in its common action, and in that recognition the future nation is "already indivisible" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 73).
Fanon's account of the national bourgeoisie in "The Misadventures of National Consciousness" is also structured by the Sartrean dialectic. The national bourgeoisie, Fanon argues, is "the historical result of the incapacity of the national middle class of under-developed countries to rationalize popular praxis, which is to say to extract its reason" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 119). The bourgeoisie fails to complete the movement from seriality to group-in-fusion; it installs itself in the colonial state without transforming the practico-inert. Fanon is scathing: the national bourgeoisie "is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 120). It becomes "the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neocolonialism" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 121). The result is that the group-in-fusion does not fully realize itself, and the national pledge is missed.
Etherington argues that Fanon's analysis here "veers from the sequence of revolutionary praxis set out in the Critique" (Etherington 175). Yet this is not a failure of Fanon's theory but its point: The Wretched of the Earth is written in 1961, in the midst of decolonization, as an intervention urging decolonizers to renew their efforts toward genuine revolution. Fanon's turn to the peasantry—"the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain"—and his insistence that "the starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 61) represent his attempt to locate the true group-in-fusion outside the compromised national bourgeoisie.
Conclusion: A New Humanism
The trajectory from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth represents Fanon's transformation of Sartrean thought. In the earlier work, Fanon uses Sartre's phenomenology of the look and shame to describe the racialized subject's alienation, while exposing the limits of Sartre's universalism. In the later work, Fanon absorbs Sartre's dialectical reason to theorize decolonization as collective praxis. The result is a "new humanism"—a concept that Fanon shares with Sartre but redefines in anti-colonial terms. As Courville argues, "Postcolonialism is not as dependent on either [Said or Foucault] as is typically thought"; its roots lie deeper, in the Fanon–Sartre relationship (Courville 231). Fanon's appropriation of Sartre is a matter of "eccentric repetition"—the transformation of a theory through its relocation into a new context (Courville 224).
The new humanism that Fanon articulates in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth is not the universalism of the European Enlightenment, but a humanism that emerges from the struggle against colonialism. Fanon calls for a "new man" who does not repudiate "the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward" but who recognizes that Europe's political economy is inseparable from its history of colonial brutality (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 254). The Third World must not persist with a European system in which commodity production structures civic life: "We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 253). The "new humanism" is thus a humanism that has passed through the dialectic of colonialism and emerged transformed—just as Fanon's thought has passed through Sartre and emerged as something irreducibly his own.
What Fanon demonstrates, finally, is that the postcolonial intellectual's relation to European theory cannot be one of simple acceptance or simple rejection. It must be one of critical appropriation: using the tools of the master to dismantle the master's house, while refusing to be confined within the master's categories. The look, the shame, and the praxis—these are Sartrean concepts, but in Fanon's hands they become instruments of decolonization. The genealogy of postcolonialism, as Courville suggests, runs not only through Foucault and Said but through Sartre and Fanon (Courville 231). To read Fanon is to read Sartre against himself—and to discover, in that reading, the possibility of a new humanism.
Works Cited
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