The Quest for Racial Identity in Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon and the Novels of James Baldwin

Blackness plays a critical role in the works of Baldwin and Fanon. The scope of anti-black racism is the effective core of racial oppression, withal historical perspective of Baldwin and Fanon specifies European and American white people’s role in the world today. Questions of race, history, and oppressed peoples’ rights is the question of memory in the realm of cultural history that both Baldwin and Fanon are investigating accordingly. Baldwin breaks the question of the status of cultural forms from Fanon by anti-black racist regimes. Fanon’s Sartreanism reflected as the break with history, and the abjection of memory emphasized the preciousness of the future. Baldwin’s account of African-American life under regimes of anti-black racism is merely the meaning of the imagined future. Baldwin and Fanon begin with the situatedness of the existential condition of irreducible non-belonging and discuss anti-racist struggle in search of finding a place to be lived.