Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon is the author and the narrator of Black Skin, White Masks. Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Fanon was the student of Aimé Césaire, whose work he both praises and critiques in the…
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Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire is a Martinician poet, critic, and politician. He is also the founder of Négritude, an artistic-political movement influenced by surrealism that celebrates the black diaspora. Césaire’s most well-known works are Notebook of…
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Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus)
Mayotte Capécia is the pen name of Lucette Ceranus, author of the 1948 semi-autobiographical novel I Am a Martinican Woman. Fanon refers to this book to describe the feelings of self-hatred that colonialism instils…
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Sigmund Freud
Known as “the father of psychoanalysis,” Sigmund Freud is one of the most important intellectuals of the modern era. Born to a Jewish family in the Freiburg in the Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic)…
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx is a German philosopher who is widely recognized as the most important theorist of socialism in history. Born in Prussia, Marx is the author of Capital (1867-1883) and (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist…
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Octave Mannoni
Octave Mannoni is a French psychoanalyst. The entire fourth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks is dedicated to Fanon’s critique of Mannoni’s book, The Psychology of Colonization (1956). Fanon argues that Mannoni accurately observes certain…
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Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre is a French writer and philosopher, famous for his association with existentialism. Fanon and Sartre mutually influence one another; however, Fanon is also critical of some of Sartre’s ideas. For example, he argues…
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George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
G.W.F. Hegel is an 18th-19th century German philosopher whose work exerts a major influence on both Marxism and psychoanalysis. Hegel is the inventor of the master-slave dialectic, a concept describing how people become conscious of…
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Minor Characters
Anna Freud
Anna Freud is Sigmund Freud’s daughter and a major psychoanalytic theorist in her own right. She is particularly influential in the field of child psychology.
Abdoulaye Sadji
Adboulaye Sadji is a Senegalese writer and educator. He is the author of the novel Nini (1954), the tragic story of a biracial woman. Fanon analyzes Nini in his discussion of the relationship between racism and romantic love. Sadji is closely associated with Négritude.
René Maran
René Maran is a French Guayanese author who grew up at first in Martinique, then Gabon, before moving to France to attend boarding school. Fanon analyzes Maran’s autobiographical novel, A Man Like Any Other (1947), which describes the life of a gifted yet troubled black man in France.
Germaine Guex
Germaine Guex is a Swiss psychologist. Fanon uses her book, The Abandonment Neurosis (1950), to analyze René Maran’s novel A Man Like Any Other. Fanon expands on Guex’s ideas to include issues of race and racism.
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler is an Austrian psychologist who is most closely associated with his work on the inferiority complex. Fanon makes use of some of Adler’s ideas, but critiques Adler’s focus on the individual and his failure to examine psychological phenomena in their wider sociopolitical context.
