"Four Hundred Years of Oppression"

In traditional Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, as Frantz Fanon describes it in his book Black Skin, White Masks, fantasy and trauma reference the infantile experiences and psyches of individual subjects. However, Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on the origins and possibilities of transmission of trauma and fantasy can hardly be so neatly encapsulated, and, in fact, Fanon’s writings on psychoanalysis and race—in that he argues that racism and colonialism operate not just at the level of economics and power, but also at the level of cultural fantasy—in many ways build on Freud’s work, even as Fanon sought to diverge from the Freudian tradition. But while Fanon’s theories of the origin and transmission of trauma may not have as radically diverged from Freud as Fanon often claimed, perhaps Fanon’s greatest intervention in psychoanalytic thought was his focus on the psychical reality of race and his contention that all subjects in a racialized colonial context—black or white, colonized or colonizer—are constituted in and through cultural fantasies of race. Kami Chisholm
Ph.D.

Film sequence from Soul Man (1986)