Black skin, white desire ― the fetishization of the black male body as a control tool

Abstract

 Frantz Fanon (2002; 2008), psychiatrist and revolutionary, exposes how colonialism imposes a hierarchical structure based on race, and interprets the black body as a locus of desire, fear and exclusion, marked by the "epidermalization of inferiority". It points out how the sexuality and corporality of black subjects were historically instrumentalized in colonial contexts, functioning both as a tool for social ascension and as a mechanism of domination and stigmatization. This critical key, added to the notion of fetishization by Homi K. Bhabha (1998) and the critique of black reason by Achille Mbembe (2013), allows propose an analysis of the representation of the black body, especially that of the narrator-character D'Chimbo, in the novel Le Nègre du Gouverneur (2001), by Serge Patient; and investigate how the trajectory of D'Chimbo highlights the ambiguities of black body fetishization, revealing the limits of the process of cultural assimilation in 19th century French Guiana. It is concluded that, although D'Chimbo instrumentalizes his sexuality and language as mobility strategies, his rise remains limited, because colonialism recognizes him only as a spectacle, never as a full-fledged subject. Serge Patient’s narrative thus reveals the paradoxes of assimilation and reaffirms the black body as a territory of political and symbolic dispute, contributing to current reflections on structural racism, identity and cultural resistance.