Intersections of racist identification, love, and guilt

On the vicissitudes of colonial masochism

Abstract

In a short yet dense section of Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon tackles an unexpected topic, namely that of how, within colonial contexts, white subjects might enjoy or fantasize scenes involving their own humiliation or debasement by those they have colonized. These pages make an important contribution to psychoanalytic engagements with the project of decolonization, revealing, as they do, facets of the masochistic unconscious dynamics of colonial racism in which guilt, identification, and sadism/masochism intersect. In this article, I provide a commentary—both expository and in some respects critical—on Fanon’s all too brief analysis of such unconscious and/or sublimated scenes. I close with a few remarks on questions and further research questions posed by Fanon’s analysis.