Political Theory Workshop: Ainsley LeSure (Occidental/Brown)

Title: "Reading Black Skin, White Masks Phenomenologically in Hot Pursuit of a White Supremacist World"

Abstract: This paper explores the significance of Frantz Fanon's turn to phenomenology to explicate the psychical toll racism exacts on black people in Black Skin, White Masks by excavating the deep critical engagement Fanon stages with Merleau-Ponty's account of hallucination, the phenomenal body, and the world in the Phenomenology of Perception. This reading opens up interesting avenues for a political and phenomenological account of black liberation.