Fanon's Body: Judith Butler's Reading of the "Historico-Racial Schema"

Abstract:This article approaches Judith Butler as herself a theorist of race and racism by exploring her unacknowledged and often problematic reading of Frantz Fanon and his concept of the historico-racial schema. It first traces Butler's uses of Fanon's thinking across her work, outlining the different ways that she draws on Fanon in theorizing race and racism. The article then shows how that theorizing stems from Butler's reading of the historico-racial schema, focusing on her insertion of words that do not appear in either the translation she cites or in the original French text into a key quotation. This article argues that this systematic misreading of the historico-racial schema in Black Skin, White Masks problematically restricts Butler's understanding of the lasting effects and ethical consequences of racism and colonialism as they appear in her readings of that text and of The Wretched of the Earth.