Black skin, white masks
To examine how migrant African bodies are perceived postmortem, we must first address the colonial groundwork that renders the migrant a spirit of unbelonging long before death. In this foundational exhibit, we look to the work of Frantz Fanon to unveil the hypervisibility and misrecognition inherent in the Black experience. Fanon argues that the Black man is systematically denied ontological being; he does not exist as a self-defined subject, but as a collection of pre-imposed identities "fixed" by the white gaze.
Black skin, white masks - Frantz Fanon, 1952
Originally published in French as Peau noire, masques blancs, this seminal text serves as a psychoanalytic study of the dehumanizing effects of colonial subjugation. While the book covers a vast range of sociopolitical and psychological terrain, this archive draws primarily from Chapter 5, titled “The Fact of Blackness” or “The Lived Experience of a Black Man” (L’expérience vécue du Noir). It is in this chapter that Fanon most poignantly describes the visceral experience of being watched and named by a colonial society.
"The fact of blackness"
In Chapter 5, Fanon uses a deeply personal experience to back his theory, describing the traumatic transition of shifting from subject to "object among other objects." The moment a white child exclaims, "Look, a Negro! I’m frightened!" the Black man is "fixed" by the white gaze. In this moment, his corporeal schema—the simple, internal awareness of one’s own physical body—is violently replaced by a "racial epidermal schema." He no longer exists as an individual with agency but as a representative of every historical stereotype associated with Blackness. He is "overdetermined from without," his identity constructed not by his internal life, but by the overlapping colonial perspective that views his skin as a badge of otherness.
The fixed corpse
The migrant corpse represents the ultimate culmination of Fanon’s theories. While the living migrant is often linguistically alienated—forced to negotiate their humanity through a foreign tongue—the corpse is stripped of this agency entirely. It cannot attempt to use reason to combat prejudice or code-switch to find safety. Without the capability of language, the migrant corpse becomes a message board where the body alone signals identity. Here, the "fixation" of the white gaze is absolute. The corpse is no longer a subject in transit, but an object, fixed by a state perspective that views its very presence as an intrusion.
A haunting shift...
In spite of the absence of voice or language in death, the sight of the corpse often carries greater impact than the sound of the migrant’s voice premortem, demanding a form of acknowledgement from those who perceive them. Because a corpse must be buried somewhere, it demands what the living migrant was often denied: a permanent space. Only when the voice is extinguished and the body is "fixed" forever does the state finally grant a grim version of the ontological subjectivity that Fanon describes—a recognition of presence and a "right to rest" from which the migrant was barred in life.