Larry Saha Room (HA2175), Haydon-Allen Building, ANU.  Presented by Dr Rachel Bloul, School of Sociology, ANU

In « Peaux noires, masques blancs » (1952) Franz Fanon criticizes Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding of racism in “Reflexions sur la question juive” (1946). Using a phenomenological approach, he develops the notion of the ‘racial epidermal schema’ which he argues differentiates Blacks’ from Jews’ experiences of racism as the Jews, after all, ‘can pass’. Though Fanon’s painful insights into the dynamics of racist corporeal exchanges have been very fruitful, the paper argues that there is more to intercorporeal racist encounters than the racial epidermal schema. Using Fanon’s reflexive phenomenological approach, the writer develops the notion of the ‘telehaptic moment’ to analyze the damaging intercorporeal dynamics of racialized abjection.