Sociogeny beyond the Human: Race and Animality in Frantz Fanon and Patrick Chamoiseau

What is it about?

Extending a recent turn at the interstice of Black and animal studies, this article analyzes two works by Martinican writers: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and Patrick Chamoiseau’s The Old Slave and the Mastiff (2018). I read Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny” as an effort to think Black subjectivity within a reformulated analytic of European phenomenology, interpreting it as a non-anthroponormative process by which meanings produce the existence they purport to describe; read in this light, Fanon’s human becomes an animal able to recognize its non-humanization. My reading of Chamoiseau highlights the implications of Fanon’s concept for understanding the coproduction and incommensurability of “race” and “animality.” Enslaved man and mastiff are subject to an identity that is not merely discursive but sociogenic, and both possess an agency that exceeds their subjectivation at the enslaver’s hands. Chamoiseau, I argue, directly represents what Fanon leaves only tacit: sociogeny beyond the human.

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