<i>Malinchismo</i> and Misogyny in Fanon’s <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>: Reading Fanon from the Hispanic Caribbean

In the second chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), “The Women of color and the white man” (1967[1952]), Frantz Fanon makes some assertions about black Martiniquais women that gained him the criticism of some feminist theorists as a misogynist. Fanon will find in the expressed xenocentrism or malinchismo of black Martiniquais women a perhaps radical expression of the “dependency complex” he will attempt to document for Negroes in general. Reading Fanon against the backdrop of a Caribbean literary tradition of romantic novels, it is hoped, will help achieve two things: placing Fanon’s writing in the cultural and geo-political context in which it was produced, and where his statements about female malinchismo can be read in a new light; and consequently, pointing to the pitfalls of the feminist critique of Fanon as misogynist. The election of reading Fanon against a fictional literary tradition seems justified by the fact that Fanon himself would recur to a novel, Mayotte Capecia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), as a paradigmatic example of the phenomenon of malinchismo that he was trying to document.