Fanonian Slips: The Rhetorical Function & Field of the White Mask

Abstract

This essay theorizes Fanonian slips as way of describing the misfires that may occur in rhetorical gestures aimed at soothing moments of racial tension. Fanonian slips further articulate how those misfires accidentally reveal broader processes by which various individuals mobilize “Black skin” and “white masks” as guiding posts for establishing order within the interpersonal, the political, and the internal. Accordingly, the essay analyzes an eclectic mix of artifacts including the rhetoric of Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, U.S. President Barack Obama, and two auto-ethnographic accounts, to demonstrate that these slips are pervasive within, and endemic to, Western communication.

Keywords:

• Anti-Blackness
• Fanon
• Psychoanalysis
• Rhetoric

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In referring to them as “Janus-faced icons,” I am drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) argument that the Christian model of divinity/profanity (e.g. God versus Satan) is mapped onto the relationship between whiteness and Blackness (p. 264).

2. Lundberg highlights how the tropes deployed in a subject’s rhetorics reveal the psychic investments that govern their self-image and navigation of culture, confirming Lacan’s claim that scholars need to more directly wrestle with the fact that “racism imbues every single human utterance” (Lebovits-Quenehen, 2020).

3. As Joshua Gunn (2003) indicates, we must also pay attention to the Imaginary as a process of crafting images – as the baby does using the mirror – that order the psyche and are embedded in social relations (p. 43).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles Athanasopoulos

Charles Athanasopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. His research interests include Black studies, activism, racial icons, street art, and media studies.