Fanon's Lexical Intervention

This essay provides a subtly new reading of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Masks; 1952) through a re-examination of one of its key terms: noirceur, or 'blackness'. While noirceur slips easily into English translation as Blackness, it was never available or viable in French as a way to speak about Black identity, at least not before Fanon. Hence the need for Negritude. By considering Fanon's use of noirceur as a case of 'semantic neologism', I argue that Fanon's re-appropriation and resignification of the term played a role alongside the more spectacular 'Negritude' in the broader effort to represent - indeed, to lexicalize - Blackness in French

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Hybridity · Identity (music · Linguistics · Literature · Neologism · Reading (process · White (mutation · African history and culture studies · French Literature and Poetry · Historical and Literary Analyses · Philosophy