Subjective Elasticity, the “Zone of Nonbeing” and Fanon’s New Humanism in Black Skin, White Masks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that the all-too-easy dismissal of Frantz Fanon’s bold “new humanism” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) relies upon a bracketing of the elastic narratorial patterns which make such an imaginative leap possible in the first place. In choosing instead to foreground such triggers, this article seeks to re-establish the link between Fanon’s text, his descent into the “zone of nonbeing” and his subsequent attempt to negotiate this zone by way of a performative, non-ocular and cosmopolitan humanistic reimagining. The article also pays close attention to the ways in which Fanon’s adapted, colonial existentialism (out of which his new humanism grows) dialogues with and necessarily separates from its Sartrean basis, creating along the way a new form of nonbeing which, rather than annul colonial subjectivity, opens up a dynamic, dangerous and germinative space in which new modes of intersubjective connectivity can be imagined.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".