36 chApter one
unimaginable without a rehabilitation of masculinity” (96). I remain com-
pelled by Seshadri- Crooks’s commitment to the promise of more inclusive
futures that can be shaped through politics that themselves hinged on par-
ticular forms of exclusion. Other accounts of Fanon’s masculine politics,
however, explicitly pressure the idea that such political discourses might
give way to an increasingly expansive and inclusive politics to come.^4 Gwen
Bergner signals how Fanon’s “universal” subject is specifically male, indi-
cating that “racial identities intersect with sexual difference” (2005, 3). She
aims to examine the role of gender in Black Skin, White Masks in order to
“broaden Fanon’s outline of black women’s subjectivity and to work toward
delineating the interdependence of race and gender” (3). Feminine sub-
jectivity is both crucial to and absent from Black Skin, White Masks, and
this slippage becomes vital to understanding Fanon’s own account of ra-
cialized masculine subject formation (9). For Bergner, then, the parsing of
race and gender in Fanon’s psychoanalytic formulation of the “universal”
is imperative to mobilizing his anticolonialism, to recognizing what Fanon
overlooked—namely, how colonial society “perpetuates racial inequality
through structures of sexual difference” (13).
In “The Woman of Color and the White Man” (1967h), Fanon famously
engages an extended, wholly unsympathetic reading of Mayotte Capécia’s
autobiography, Je suis Martiniquaise (1948). Introducing this text as “cut-
rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption,” Fanon embarks on
a psychoanalytic reading of black Antillean female subjectivity through a
narrative account of a woman’s desire to be married to a white man (1967h,
42). In an interesting move, Fanon narrativizes Capécia’s own narrative
account by beginning his discussion of her text as follows: “One day a
woman named Mayotte Capécia, obeying a motivation whose elements
are difficult to detect, sat down to write 202 pages—her life—in which
the most ridiculous ideas proliferated at random. The enthusiastic recep-
tion that greeted this book in certain circles forces us to analyze it” (42).
Fanon’s introduction to this text, which he proceeds to rail against, is cast
as a story—“one day a woman.. .”—that represents a black woman’s desire
to self- represent as not only absurd but incomprehensible. Like so many
other gendered and sexed slippages and continuities across Fanon, here
his telling of Capécia’s own story becomes a story in itself, one in which
Fanon as narrator tells us that the motivations of his black, female antihero
are “difficult to detect.” It is she, after all, who extends out to all women