Peau Noire, Masques Blancs

First published in 1952, Black Skin, White Masks is Frantz Fanon's searching analysis of the psychological damage inflicted by colonialism and racism. Drawing on his training as a psychiatrist, his reading of psychoanalysis and philosophy, and his own experience as a Black Martinican man in France, Fanon examines what it does to a person to live in a world that has defined them, in advance, as inferior.

Fanon describes the way colonised people are pressured to internalise the values and language of the coloniser — to wear a "white mask" over "black skin" — and the impossible double bind this creates. Moving between clinical observation, literary criticism, and impassioned polemic, he analyses language, desire, love, and the everyday experience of being seen first as a category and only second as a human being.

A foundational text of anticolonial thought and later of postcolonial and critical race theory, Black Skin, White Masks remains a raw, difficult, and profoundly influential work — an attempt to understand, and ultimately to refuse, the psychology of oppression.