Fanon on Non-Being, Language, and Colonialism as a Total Project

A discussion of the Introduction and opening chapter to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, with particular attention to the relation between language and the zone of non-being. Fanon ties language and being together with such intimacy that the colonial command and control of language - its capacity to sustain culture, world, and civilization - is the cornerstone of antiblackness. Proper diction is no liberation, because racism works through our embodied presence to one another; race is epidermal, not biological or predetermined. But the epidermal builds a decisive, alienating exception into speaking: one is always black or white, no matter one's relation to diction, and that disjunct means everything in sustaining an antiblack world.