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THE “FACT OF BLACKNESS” DOES NOT EXIST: AN EVOCATIVE CRITICISM OF RESISTANCE RHETORIC IN ACADEMIC POLICY DEBATE AND ITS (MIS)USE OF FRANTZ FANON’S BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS BY BRENDON BANKEY A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Communication August 2013 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Michael J. Hyde, Ph.D., Advisor Mary M. Dalton, Ph.D., Chair R. Jarrod Atchison, Ph.D. Acknowledgements I would like to take this brief opportunity to thank some folks who have provided me support throughout my time at Wake Forest. First, I am tremendously grateful for my family. Without their assistance and guidance there is no telling where I would be today. Thank you to my mothers Michelle and Susan; my fathers Henry, Jeff, and Robert; my brothers Alex, Gerald, and Malik; my sisters Marisa, Chelsea, Shirley, and Alice; and my Aunt Sharon for your constant encouragement and for making me feel at home in the many houses I have inhabited. Next, I would like to thank the wonderful people I have worked with in Wake Forest’s Communication Department. I would like to thank Patty, without whom the department would not function. I also am deeply indebted to my advisor, Dr. Michael J. Hyde, for his patience and flexibility during the many directions this project took. I would like to thank my panel chair, Dr. Mary Dalton, for her unique point of view and for always greeting those she encounters with a smile. Likewise, Dr. Louden and Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Von Burg are incredibly warm professors who are deeply committed to the success of their students. Words cannot express my gratitude toward Jarrod. Had it not been for him, I probably never would have studied communication except as a supplement to an undergraduate business major. Who ever thought 2013 would be the year to break the curse? I would also like to give a shoutout to some of the people in the debate community that have supported me during this project. Thank you to the students of Wake Debate. Thank you to Justin, Len, CT, Aaron, Logan, Cat, Mikaela, Oz, Slatts, Leah, Dan, and Struth for teaching me how to be a better debate coach. Outside of Wake Forest, I would like to extend appreciative snaps to Jamie, Luke, Nick, John, Michael, Alex Moon, Sarah Clemons, Topp Dr., Blumie, Rubaie, Elyse, RJ, Eric, Ryan, Sean, Patrick and Erum for making my time in policy debate so great. Finally, I wish to offer a special thank you to Toya ‘Oh Boya’ for showing me how to be a better human. ii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Chapter One – Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter Notes.................................................................................................... 28 Chapter Two – L’Expérience Vécue du Noir and Policy Debate ...................................... 40 Chapter Notes.................................................................................................... 62 Chapter Three – The Missing Figure of Sho’ Good Eatin’ .............................................. 66 Chapter Notes.................................................................................................. 107 Chapter Four – Trope-A-Dupe: The Problem Posed by Reid-Brinkley’s Resistance for Achieving Disalienation and Positive Voice .................................................................. 114 Chapter Notes.................................................................................................. 142 Chapter Five – Conclusion.............................................................................................. 146 Chapter Notes.................................................................................................. 155 References ....................................................................................................................... 156 Curriculum Vitae ............................................................................................................ 166 iii Abstract Scholars of black/white social relations often cite Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks for its psychological analysis of the “Fact of Blackness.” Attributing this supposed facticity to a fundamental mistranslation of the original French text, this thesis explores the implications of scholar’s adherence to Fanon within elements of resistance rhetoric. Moreover, through evocative criticism, this thesis examines Black Skin, White Masks as a phenomenological text whose findings establish communication as a first step to dismantling forms of language that reify social alienation. Alongside rhetorical theories of disalienation, voice, and authentic communication, this thesis applies Fanon’s thought to popular understandings of resistance in the academic policy debate community as forwarded by Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley. In doing so, it challenges her conception of whiteness, black aesthetic performance, and signifyin(g) as antithetical to Fanon’s goal for communication. While examples of resistance rhetoric demonstrated by Reid- Brinkley have achieved increasing competitive success in spaces of policy debate, it remains to be seen these strategies can escape the suffocating reification brought about by our collective adherence to the inhuman voices of the past. iv Chapter One – Introduction I am going out on a limb. This is a precarious position, but the stakes are high enough to warrant risky business. (E. Patrick Johnson)1 I, a man of color, want but one thing: May man never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of man by man—that is to say, of me by another—cease. May I be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be. The black man is not. No more than the white man. Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born. Before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation. At the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency. The misfortune of man is that he was once a child. It is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension with his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world. Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man? At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness. My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions! (Frantz Fanon)2 The quotation above presents the concluding thoughts of Frantz Fanon’s “iconic text” Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon is acclaimed as “the one francophone critic who has had the greatest impact on American academic postcolonialism.”3 Black Skin, White Masks, published in its original French six decades ago, continues to offer visceral insight into the forms of social alienation faced by colonized peoples in Western society. Its text presents an analysis of the “massive psycho-existential complex” that arose from colonized Antillean peoples’ attempts to embody the likeness of Francophone culture in the first half of the twentieth century. As a psychologist, Fanon’s goal was to stage an examination of “the juxtaposition of the black and white races” as a means “to discover 1 the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white civilization.” Among these “mental attitudes,” Fanon found the presence of a “double narcissism” whereby, after centuries of subjection to colonialism, “the black man wants to be white” while, after centuries of propagating dehumanizing colonization, “the white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man.” For Fanon, this paradox creates a dilemma that results in white folks “locked in [their] whiteness” and black folks “locked in [their] blackness,” each unable to appreciate the other’s humanity.4 Fanon’s immediate goal with Black Skin, White Masks was to “break the cycle” of “this double narcissism” by revealing “the affective disorders responsible for [the] network of complexes” that propagated it. In doing so, he provided “a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem” to provide “a mirror with progressive infrastructure where the black man can find the path to disalienation.” Fanon’s focus throughout the text is primarily “psychological.” He nevertheless recognized that “a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities” facing black folks was also necessary to free them from alienation. For Fanon, “true disalienation” required an understanding that the “inferiority complex” of black folks results from a twofold process of alienation. This process is “first, economic.” And second, it is maintained by an “internalization or rather epidermalization of [the] inferiority” colonized people experience through their encounters with white colonizers both at home and abroad.5 Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks for the explicit purpose of black folks’ mental liberation, the book also establishes the goal of “[enabling] healthy relations between Blacks and Whites” through reinvigorated practices of communication.6 In philosopher and ethicist Anthony Kwame Appiah’s Foreword of 2 Richard Philcox’s recent translation of the text, he concludes by acknowledging

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