Reconceiving the Body, Taking Cues from Frantz Fanon

Nathifa Greene, PhD Candidate

State University of New York, Stony Brook

This presentation will focus on the concept of the body that Frantz Fanon deploys in Black Skin, White Masks, to align his clinical observations with contemporary theories of embodied social cognition. I focus on his use of the term “body schema” in this text, since this provocative use of embodiment theory opens onto productive insights on the impact of stereotypes in academic settings.

Social psychologists have coined the term “stereotype threat” to describe the negative impact of stereotypes. Claude Steele describes stereotype threat as a result of what he calls an “identity contingency” in Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. These are, in his words, “something you have to deal with because you have a given social identity.” I claim that Fanon sheds light on the bodily facets of this phenomenon, thus pointing to connections between the embodied self and the broader social realm that a person inhabits.

Researchers have noted that stereotype threat can occur even when experimental subjects report no negative feelings about their ethnicity, gender, or other facets of their identity. Theories of embodied cognition that attend to social identity, as Fanon does, provide a better account, in this regard, because this perspective attends to levels of experience beneath explicit, conscious awareness. This is a pressing concern because students’ struggles against stereotypes can be construed as inferior academic ability. Identifying this element of minority students’ academic experiences is important in the interest of what Rosalba Icaza calls “cognitive injustice” in education.

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For more information contact Annet van Geen or Roy Huijsmans