Hey everyone welcome can everybody hear me yes excellent excellent I haven’t lost my voice yet gray hair hasn’t taken it away uh it is my pleasure uh to introduce uh Dr Norman AAR uh I can’t tell you the excitement I have when I have to read this young man’s work this
Young philosopher is exciting it’s bold the work that he does on black dignity and anti-black racism is fundamentally changes the way that people think in the United States and France exactly the type of scholar H Colonial worker uh an activist slash intellectual uh that we that we need at
A at a place like the University of Edinburgh uh today he’s going to talk about phenon and black male studies a black male studies is a newly emerging Paradigm that’s come up about to talk about the experiences and the oppression of racialized men in the world over uh
It started with an investigation to how black men were being oppressed not only on the basis of racism and white supremacy but also based on their melness uh eliminated in genocide uh sexually exploited made to penetrate violence these are all considerations that black male studies is trying to change and challenge ongoing gender
Paradigms with so Dr jar is one of the leading scholars in the world uh in this newly emerging field so I i’ would like you to join me and welcome me for his talk on [Applause] fan well thank you thank you very much Tommy for this extremely extremely generous intro
Introduction uh I will sit if you do not see any problem with that I know I’m losing some Charisma points here but I have I have a text so maybe it’s it’s it’s going to be easier so France fos po Mas is not an easy reading F accumulates strange metaphors
Resorts to cryptic cisms or technical vocabulary for a very vast array of disciplines biological science from biological sciences to the humanities he C discusses philosopher novelist poets like many African philosophers he is committed to express the radicality of his thought by any intellectual means necessary but even when his words are adamant and
Straightforward we’ve not always been able to decipher their meaning acting as the typical parast Fel writes in the introduction of the book The Following running the risk of angering my black Brothers running the risk of angering my black Brothers I shall say that the black is not a
Man despite F’s explicit call to fraternity this sentence has sorry okay um um despite F’s explicit C to fraternity this sentence has often been interpreted resorting to abstract humanism there has been a will not to admit the obvious that from the very beginning of the book feno’s message is
Unequivocally addressed to black men and the bad news he brings them is that they are neither human or males as those are the two meanings the concept took throughout modernity writing this he is convinced that he goes against the grain and contradicts most of black male’s ints and beliefs revealing a misplaced
Narcissism in other words he aims at undermining black men’s illusionary confidence in their own manhood and Humanity this is why I argue that F did not only conceive black black skins white masks as a book on race relations with large but also as an investigation of black dehumanized
Masculinity this idea is not taken for granted when F’s focus on black males has been underlined it was often under the guise of accusations of misogyny built upon the assumption that racialized masculinity was not a legitimate theoretical topic of of Investigation following Rea Jedi Butler has diagnosed a pervasive masculinism at
The heart of feno’s revolutionary political thought in order to mitigate the condemnation she theorizes here um his in description of anti-colonial masculinity as a compens compensatory motivation precautious lines of thought as evidenced in Butler or teing and Char Play Written exemplify how the only viable option to contradict the
Delegitimizing of feno’s account on gender have been to magnanimously prove that his discreet but but inflexible commitment to women’s Liberation as a radical humanist as well as his usefulness to anti-racist feminist Liberation theory and practice temper his neosexism and latent homophobia but those dismissals conditional acceptances or careful rehabilitations all share the
Same exemptive logic predicated upon the idea that feno’s focus on black and other colonized males is in itself suspicious and is paired with an acceptable chanism it is seen as a flow in his thought which cannot have any posi value it has to be con compensated for but neither accepted nor
Embraced Tommy Ker’s analysis of um the treatment of black manhood in contemporary theoretical discourse has cast a doubt on the supposed obviousness of the illegitimacy of any theoretical focus on racial males while other subjects have been offered the ability to speak individual ually as member of oppressed or marginalized groups black men are
Censored told that any mention of their oppression vulnerability or death is patriarchal because it inappropriately centers their experience of a women’s oppression with large and thereby not worthy of mere intellectual concern or research end quote in contradiction with such predominantly negative approach toward foo’s conceptualization of manhood kalpana sishir crrs has argued
That we should acknowledge feno’s masculinism and contextualize it historically as a strategy that arises from his analysis of the nature of colonialism and resistance to it despite the imperative the interpretative charity she displays sashii krook’s assimilating fos analysis to masculinism is questionable suffix ism defines it as a prescriptive
Discourse but is any discourse on black manhood that resist the simp to to Simply condemn or vilify its subject inherently masculinist cannot it be descriptive rather than prescriptive instead of integrating him with vague thought in glorious masculine uh vaguely thought masculinist project maybe should we see f as a
Precursor of black male studies which Curry describes as follows black male studies refuses the pathologization of black men and boys a theoretical advance and proposes the empirically informed account of black male life it’s in disputable value as the basis to condemn and object to black male death in other words it is possible
To read F’s focus on men and boys neither as a blind spot nor as a m centered militant strategy but rather as an acknowledgement of the specific racist misandry instituted by Colonial Powers following this line of thought my paper is an attempt to provide a philologically accurate account of Pho
Rising of colonized males facing with white facing white desire doing so I aim at showing both how his writing paved the way to the in field of contemporary blackmail studies and how psychoanalytical philosophical and political insights he offers are still apt to enrich our understanding of racialized male uh racialized men and
Boys today I will Begin by focusing on the specificity and originality of pho’s interpretation of patriarchy not only in black skin white masks but also in his second book a dying colonialism although the first book focuses on the black diaspora and the second on uh that of colonized North
Africans I hope to show the coherence of F’s analysis and definition of patriarchy second I am going to insist on F’s original interpretation of the notion of libidinal economy in psychoanalytic theory libidinal economy deals with the collective organizing of Desire preferred object of lust and disgust and the reason for suchar
Investment feno is part is part of a school of thought named institutional Psychotherapy according to whom there is no radical split between private desires and Collective public action the question of the resemblance um or Unity of Social and Desiring Investments is usually is usually raised through a fudo Marxist
Paradigm that presupposes that social oppression Works suppressing desire let us for for instance think of Herbert maru’s notion of civilization as Surplus risk repression Felix gu’s idea that capitalism generates a Great Divide between political and liberal economy or um ber stigler’s thesis that cognitive economy turns our capacity to sustain
Long-term Desiring investments into self-destructive pulsion beyond their obvious differences all those theories share the same assumption that desire is inherently good and and empowering and that violence comes from its social tethering or smothering on the other hand pho’s analysis of racial and Colonial desire breaks with this tradition demonstrating the pervasiveness intensity and
Exuberance of multiple forms of Desire encouraged by imperialism both the colonizers and the colonized are vehicles of a great amount of Lial Investments predominantly oriented towards appropriation extermination or self Annihilation one of feno’s most Central tasks consider consisted in identifying and attempting to reorient those pathological forms of
Desire since zigmund fud family has been theorized as the place where human Des is shaped following this line black skin white masks provides a sketchy yet coherent definition of the patriarchal European family thano firstly describes patriarchy as a pathogenic structure the patriarchal European family with its flaws failings and vices in close
Contact with the society we know produces about 30% of neurotics F says in other words people within the European patriarchal family suffer from mental health disorder but Pho pushes the description further relating the anthropological and psychological discussion on family with the specific context of a European white Colonial
Nation state he writes in Europe the family represents the way the world reveals itself to the child the family structure and the national structure are closely connected militarization and a centralized Authority in a country automatically result in a Resurgence of the father’s Authority in Europe and in every so-called civilized or civilizing
Country the family represents a peace of the nation the child leaving the family environment finds the same laws the same principles and the same values a normal child brought by normal normal family will become a normal adult at first glance the insistence on the European family’s normality may
Appear to contradict the statement on the neurotic effects of patriarchy thano insists on the overwhelming importance of family in the shaping of the children’s world view as specific to the European family structure he underlies the nor the normative dimension of this notion of normal referring ing in a
Footnote to the French physician and philosopher Jor km influential book the normal and the pathological whose one of the most famous statements is that disease is a positive Innovative experience in the living being and not just a fact of decrease or increase the content of the pathological State cannot
Be deduced say for difference in format from the content of Health dis disease is not a variation of the dimension of Health it is a new dimension of life in other words according to fol km inspired framework there is no contradiction between European families proclivities to neurosis and its functional normality
Since here normality does not relate to some untouched and pure primitive state of the mind or body but to a normative potential that is to say it terms a capacity to create and enforce Norms through concrete actions and it does uh it does it not it does not only concern one sole
Individual but the whole Community what is at stake in the specific case of the white European patriarchal family is the shaping of an entire Society according to the Norms of the racial Pol patriarchal family contributes to shape maintain and strengthen Fel disrupts the difference between the normal and the pathological
White family in a colonial context from the point of view of a psychiatrist and especially a black psychiatrist white patriarchy produces a massive number of neurotics that is to say people who experience their own existences as effectively diminished but from a social and political point of view those neuroses
Are integral to the shaping of white polities and Colonial rues the genuine morbidity of the familial assemblage comes from its continuity with the colonial Nation it is a pole of the Imperial nation state whose both normality and pathology undistinguished concur to the reign of white supremacy and antiblackness in summary according to
Feno patriarchy does not relate either to individual entitlement or Collective Behavior it rests upon how the European State the white family and their Rel have historically been instituted drawing from F’s definition one can identify three main Dimension to patriarchy first the feder administrates the family the same way a Statesmen
Would administrate a nation second the family is meant to serve the state reproducing subjects confirming its requirements and third it is saturated with racal fantasies and stereotypes that are integral to how National belonging good health and morality are defined in the Imperial context as a consequence of the
Assumption of those three elements we must conclude that belonging to the dominant racial group is a necessary condition of the patriarchal family there is no patriarchy without the Sovereign power of the n The Sovereign power the nation state delegates to the white father Fel developed those theories in
Black skin white mask building upon the observation of differences is between the black Caribbean family and the white European one he then applied the framework to other sites of racial violence and Colonial subjugation such as North Africa interestingly enough even when he describes the most traditional aspects of Algerian cultural
Habits and family structure Fel never refers to the role of the fatter in terms of patriarchy resorting preferably to paraphrases such as the absolute respect due to the father or the old old sorry the old stal oh stultifying sorry the old stultifying attachment to the father uh this is not so because the
Concept of patriarchy is absent uh uh is absent from fos lexican he uses it in black skin white masks but in a dying colonialism as well in a strict and rigorous way the phrases Foo uses to describe the iian father referred to a very specific family type we should not
Mistake for patriarchy final remarked how the description of the colonized society as a retrograde and ferocious patriarchy became pervasive in colonial islamists and social scientist discourses in the conjuncture the politicians who discuss the fate of North Africa in the French National Assembly in Paris used the criticism of North African alleged
Patriarchal Traditions as a mean to legitimize their country civiliz civilizing mission in some it functioned as a misleading racist Trope rather than as a neutral descriptive tool however Foo does not idealize the social role Algerian traditionalism allows for women and girls he mindful of females being defined as Perpetual
Miners who are meant to stay under the guardianship of a male member of their family underlying uh that as in all Societies in which um work oh it’s not we’re not here yet but it’s okay um in all yes yes that’s it um in all Societies in which work on the land
Represents the main source uh of the means of subsistence the male who is the privileged producer enjoys a most lordly status but this specific form of inequality does not fall under the category of patriarchy as there is no Harmony between Algerian customs and the state on one hand colonial law enforc
Some aspects of Algerian traditionalism assigning North Africans to a eurocentric view on their own culture colonialism has offered uh here we go um colonialism has often strengthened or established its Domination by an organized petrification of the peasantry regimented by marabu which doctors and traditional Chiefs the rural masses still live in a
Fudal state whose uh overbearingly medieval structure is nurtured by the colonial administrators and army F right in F rights in in wred of the Earth but on the other hand a fantasy of assimilation continuously haunting French colonialism and trapping the colonized in a Perpetual double
Bind they were at the same time asked to conform to the Traditions colonialism petrified and to assimilate to European modernity in this context French progressivism functioned as a mode of legitimation for racist interventions The Stereotype of a jealous and abusive Dominion of colonized males over Brown women and
Girls Define dominant views on North African masculinity it mirrored the representation of Muslim women as a powerless oppressed group that awaits to be saved from the endemic violence of men of their own ethnicity this narrative turned French white feminists into both philanthropists and heroes of the colonial CES but according to feno a
Closer look at the inner workings of Algerian family shows that behind the visible manifest patriarchy the more significant existence of a b of a basic matriarchy is affirmed analyzing the alerian colonial situation feno maintains his definition of patur as a fundamental property of the white family that is no equivalent
In Z Balter groups in addition pho’s description of colonial attack on the Algerian family structure shows the absence of any gendered solidarity between French soldiers and brown males in North Africa quite the opposite men are the main targets of the unbridled violence of counterinsurgency tactics final wres the struggle for National
Liberation and the more and more total character of repression have inflicted grave traumatisms upon the family group a father taken into custody in the street of the company of his children stripped along with them torture Before Their Eyes the sharply experienced Brotherhood of men with bare bruised bloody shoulders it has been arrested
Dragged away imprisoned the women are then left to find ways of keeping the children from starving to death those remarks are corroborated by cont pre literature on gender side according to whom the gender selective Mass killing and disappearance of males especially battle a males remains a pervasive feature of contemporary conflict North
African men are specifically victimize in their or and their ordeal is turned into a morbid spectacle aimed at terrorizing the whole family if not the whole colony in some F’s material psychoanalytic interpretation preced and anticipated on uh Tommy Curry’s redefinition of patriarchy patriarchy a system of white male domination uses racism militarism
And sexual violence to subjugate the multiple ERS created as degradation of Western man has been made possible only through the particular Colonial violence and neoc Colonial economies of white Nations and white supremacism along those multiple economies Foo particularly insisted on libal economy underlying that white people’s ordinary appreciation
Apprehension uh of themselves is always predicated upon racial fantasies that Define Colonial practices as such if according to Foo the patriarchal European family is a branch of the white supremacist state where Colonial desire is shaped produced and con dated the next question one relates to the nature manifestations and functioning of such
Desire fal’s originality regarding traditional use of the unconscious in critical theory is that instead of insisting on the repressive the repressive role of the super ego he showed how patriarchy encourages R racially charge and tethered and brittle desires veneral lust targeting black bodies is not threatened by repression
But is free to proliferate in both culture and Society black study scholar Jared seon insisted on the paradoxical anti-black Drive which does not seek to destroy its object its aim being to preserve its object in perpetuity but is also immensely um appropriative and tends to brutalize it in a rather excessive fashion
This interpretation offers us an additional clue to understand the brutalization of racialized males fenel described during the Algerian War beyond the sole functional justification of targeting the father as a pivotal figure of the traditional family the black British philosopher David marot describes Foo as a thinker of what he calls racial fetishism here
The fetish acts as a defense against more intoler able forms of anxiety while allowing subjects to enjoy this fear more or less secretly more or less violently fetishization in other words functions as a way of overcoming racial fears and anxieties about something that cannot clearly be represented according
To marot the process of fetishization of racial laws males is a way of representing such a fear under the form of something that would be both enjoyable and disposable Beyond its obvious political function the capture torture and assassination of Algerian fathers Fel describes as a profound has a profound
Libidinal value it is not surprising that an intense level of violence has been ensh and normalized in colonial law long before the need of specific counter Insurgency measures this constitutes a clear continuity between colonialism and antiblackness in kelvin War’s term the law conceals an ontological project that divides the world between
Things and subjects between properties and those who are in position of enjoying property the interweaving of negrophobia and negrophilia is a DEC core of black skin white masks argument uh in our view fos says an individual who loves blacks is as sick as someone who aborts them the notion of pathological Colonial love
Immediately conjures up images of colonial soldiery systematically raping native women in a very sarcastic note Foo writes when a soldier from the concering troops slept with a young malgi girl there was probably no respect for alterity on his part but the same note also raises a more Uncommon question what does sexual violence
Targeting black males in colonial context stay and addressed because relations between a white woman and a black man automatically become a romantic Affair it is a gift not a rape final answers black males are not viewed as relational beings but as bruts and rapists in other words they embody a
Pure destructive force that is meant to be contained pished and brutalized by the law as a consequence if you relationship occurs it is believ to be solely due to the white women’s selflessness in this context it is an honor to be the daughter of a white women feno adds as a gender white
Womanhood belongs to the register of morality but as social anthropology taught us a gift implies a counter gift and there is no honor beyond the constant risk of this Hunter said otherwise the relation between the white woman and the black male entraps him in a precarious situation of ontological
Depth in a way the white woman’s fragile appreciation of the black man is the only thing that anchors him in humanity or even in life itself the specific desire white people Express for the black male bodies pivotal in understanding how Colonial libidinal economy works Works final wres all the be
Terrifying there is one expression that with time has become particularly eroticized the black athlete one woman confirmed in us that the very thought made her heart skip a bit let us not rush to the easier individualizing conclusion that negrophobia would be a side effect for these women’s troubled or unsatisfy
Sexual lives in fact it may very well be the other way around I argue that it is more accurate to say that black maless is how abnormality crisis and extreme perversity are coded and expressed within the Wily bidal economy anti-black racism contaminates it as a whole per par um parasitizing at various degrees
Of intensity every sexual intercourse indeed the fantasmatic of black masculinity is intrinsically linked to the place white masculinity and the possibility impossible to totally prevent and impossible to accept and admit the possibility of its deficiency the black penis exists as an external consolation designed to ease the pain of the white patriarch structure
Deficiency thanks to the company pleasure it is supposed to provide the Negro member renders The Morbid event of the white man’s fa ability insignificant obsessed by the receive horror aroused by the black male sexuality which occupies all symbolic space the white woman no longer has an eye for the gaping Fisher of white
Masculinity commenting on the so-called serious journalist Michelle Kau f notes that the black man has been occulted the black man has been occulted he has been turned into a penis he is a penis we can easily imagine what s what such descriptions can arous in a young wom from
Leon why Leon he was living there I don’t think something special about Leo women uh um young women from Leon horor desire not indifference in any case describing contemporary Caribbean uh cont Caribbean context French psychoanalyst Char Melman confirms pho’s diagnosis of fantasized black male figure balancing between
Nothingness and phic over presence if I am dependent upon a language of Mastery that refuses to acknowledge my Humanity either it is going to deny me as a sexual being or it is going to assign me a pan sex character being sex only constantly thinking of it the neurotic
Harmony of the white patriarchal family is constantly worked at its core by the excessive fantasies generated by black manhood but which help to maintain its equilibrium as soon as trouble and damage occur F’s controversial remarks in pon masan about the unconscious desire of negrophobia relates to a lack of obal
Investment that is to say loving longing and caring from someone for for someone else that is to say that black males who do not qualify as legitimate objects of affection are still apt to feel the void and they are so appropriate to the function that it creates a tempting
Illusion that the void is somehow more satisfying and provides more enjoyment than any actual object that is to say any actual white man fenel describes here a sort of splenetic dissatisfaction at the heart of modern sexual life it is not what la famously La labeled as or Surplus enjoyment but rather an
Insatiable quest for a horizon in which the partner’s is never big enough and the sexual act never intense enough obal investment becomes irrelevant since only intensity matters the Negro stands here for the parad paradigmatic figure of pure satisfaction free of any investment either because in a world shaped by
White supremacy the white women hold the power to dismiss the black men at any time or because the black male is reduced to a penile function in a negrophobia as a pure coefficient of enjoyment as a conclusion according to Foo patriarchy is the institution that links the Colonial Imperial and racist
State to the family unit it is the sup the institution by which the nation stat reproduces subjects fit to serve it within its internal economy stereotypes of colonized males play a decisive role on the one hand they are portrayed as a threat to the coherence and maintenance
Of the family and are there therefore Overexposed to the violence of repression but on the other hand as sub objects of of venial fantasies and lust black men also serve as compensatory objects suspended on the supposed but empirically unattainable inability of the white man the patriarchal order is irre irremediably
Fragile yet the caricature of black men whether negr phobic or neophilic serves to render the flaws wrongs and failures of what patriarchy eligible instead they are attributed to that monstrous hyper bow that is black manhood disproportionate in its reive potential as well as in its supposed violence Tommy Curry has described this
Process coining the neologism phallicism phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated rationalized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be sexual threat and predatory and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group this concept is meant to guide a seemingly in
Inexplicable tension if not contradiction between the description of racialized males under repressive and murderous regimes and the hypersexualization as OB objects of Desire possession and want thus the operation of ficm is the the Unspeakable evils of masculinity held to be authentic white masculinity are projected upon its disproportionate double almost beyond all
Symbolization the Negro penis thank you for uh your attention
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