In 1952 Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist in Lyon, publishes Black Skin, White Masks, turning existential phenomenology on the lived experience of the colonized: the black man overdetermined from outside, his body a racial schema before it is his own. The book founds the existential analysis of race and becomes a charter of decolonial thought.
Tagged: Existentialism
The Event
- Date
- 1952 (exact)
- Era
- The Wider Reckoning; Standard periodization of existentialist history
- Location
- Lyon; today Lyon, France
- Traditions
- Existentialism
- Streams
- Existentialism
- Key figures
- Frantz Fanon
- Key texts
- Black Skin, White Masks
Primary Sources
- Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
Secondary Sources
- Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
- Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.
Provenance: HIST-1433; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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Jaspers's Philosophie
1932
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Kierkegaard's Either/Or
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Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death
1849
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Sartre's Being and Nothingness
1943
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Sartre's Nausea
1938
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Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life
1913
World View
Existentialism
Existentialism holds that life has no built-in meaning: each person, radically free, must create a self and accept responsibility for that creation.