Black Masks, White Masks: Structural Violence in Fanon and Genet

In On Violence, Hannah Arendt defines violence as a tool wielded to serve particular interests, and unjustifiable on universal moral grounds. Drawing on Arendt’s response to Frantz’s Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and its role in justifying what she terms the “violence” of Black Power political strategies in the 1960s, I turn to Fanon’s earlier Black Skin, White Masks to define the structural violence of racism excluded from Arendt’s definition. Showing how Fanon’s text exposes the racial hierarchy that sacralizes the notion of the human, I place his text in conversation with Jean Genet’s play, The Blacks. Arguing that both works expose the structural violence of race, the rituals that maintain it, and the difficulty of countering it, I show that they both position literary and performative excess as a violence that can counter this structure from within the conventions that maintain them, and give rise to unpredictable political action.