Blackness, Colorism, and Epidermalization of Infe riority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck: A Fanonian Reading of the Play

Abstract

The fragile status of marginalized groups in a society which is largely dominated by class, racial or sexual codes of discrimination has always been a point of interest for scholars of different fields. With the advent of postcolonial studies in the second half of the twentieth century and its rising popularity onwards, a great body of sociopolitical, cultural, and psychological research has been devoted to dealing with the covert and overt mechanisms through which the colonizer-colonized relationship is defined and regulated. Deeply concerned with the process of subalternization at work in the juggernaut of colonization, many postcolonial thinkers set out to know and prevent the great metamorphosis which was taking place in the colonized native‟s rich customs and traditions as a result of exposure to the “superior” culture of the dominant oppressing group. Franz Fanon, the French critic, was one of these postcolonial thinkers who singled out the discourse of psychoanalysis to analyze the hierarchical binarism of oppressor/oppressed, its workings and its detrimental damages to the integrity and wholeness of the colonized‟s psyche.