Blackness as a World Problem

Abstract This chapter offers a phenomenological reading of the fifth chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a critical engagement with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of hallucination in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945). I argue that when Fanon says that black people are without ontology, he does not mean, as Afropessimists argue, that black people are objects, and not subjects, who amount to nothingness in the antiblack world. Instead, Fanon means that blackness—cultural knowledge of a European fabrication that gets activated by casting a black other—is nothing to the extent that it does not exist in a spatio-temporal environment, nor is it an actual phenomenon (object, person, or event) in this environment. Blackness, which Fanon depicts as a hallucination, is a perception that escapes the limits of the shared world by hijacking the gift the shared world bestows upon each living and breathing subject, their sensory field, or embodied consciousness. Fanon’s depiction of blackness as a hallucination demonstrates how racial practices project onto the living black body blackness, a mythological, European fabrication, that gets materialized through human relations that are oriented around this myth. Blackness as a fabricated myth is like a hallucination because it impersonates reality. The good news about Fanon’s phenomenological account of racism’s power of derealization is that the condition of possibility for this power is reality itself, specifically, the lived reality of black life, and the world discloses it simultaneously with any deviation from it.