The Fact Of Blackness Analysis

Race is a topic in today’s society that is unavoidable in many situations, because of the representations and ideologies of race in the world. Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, and Hunt Hawkins have each studied race and interpellation in the modern world. Fanon explored race and racial interpellation in The Fact of Blackness, Althusser explored interpellation in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Hawkins explored how race is displayed in Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s character development of Kurtz is meant to symbolize the future for Europe if it continues to dominate other people and cultures in other countries. While Fanon, Althusser, and Hawkins all possess different beliefs and ideas of race, all three
In The Fact of Blackness, Fanon describes the moment that he understood he was a black man in a white man’s world: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (87). With an optimistic view of the world, Fanon was forced to live in the reality of a dominant culture that looks down upon minority races; even the word “minority” forces an ideological view that one race is better than another. In addition, Fanon describes how synecdoches are important to understanding predetermined identities even further. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a word, picture, or another part of an object that refers to the whole of something; a synecdoche is a reciprocal relationship, which means that the whole of something can also refer to an element or component of something. When the dominant society or dominant race establishes a predetermined identity for the minorities, it is a representation of that race everywhere. Fanon himself is an example of a synecdoche because he is a Martinique who has dark skin, he is therefore subjected to the representations of his skin color worldwide. In Heart of Darkness, the synecdoche applies in the same way as it does to Fanon; the African people are subjected
Hawkins argues that Conrad implements the evolutionary trope in Heart of Darkness, but also exposes the downfall of Europeans by showing their desire for merciless control and inhumane actions to control the African colonies. An evolutionary trope is a developmental logic that white civilization is more advanced than African civilizations (Lecture 2/16/17). Kurtz himself is a representation of Europe because he is a civilized man who becomes barbaric and savage after living in Africa. In addition, Hawkins noted that in Heart of Darkness, racism explicitly occurred as “Conrad likely didn’t show more of the Africans because he wanted to focus on the Europeans” (370). Much like Kurtz himself, Conrad and Marlow conceal a lot in their use of sophisticated words and diction. In addition, their high-strung eloquence is very underrated; people will do anything that the voice asks them to do, including the African people. Ultimately, by denying the humanity of Africa, Europeans are destroying their own humanity, and therefore, Europe is destroying