Identity gets constituted when the Other’s gaze names it

Evidence

This doubleness of discourse, this necessity of the Other to the self, this inscription of identity in the look of the other finds its articulation profoundly in the ranges of a given text. And I want to cite one which I am sure you know but will not remember necessarily, though it is a wonderful, majestic moment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, when he describes himself as a young Antillean, face to face with the white French child and her mother. And the child pulls the hand of the mother and says, “Look, Mama, a black man.” And he said, “For the first time, I knew who I was. For the first time, I felt as if I had been simultaneously exploded in the gaze, in the violent gaze of the other, and at the same time, recomposed as another.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 207

Categorization

• XREF: The Fanon mirror/recognition scene is the canonical origin point the Islamophobia field repeatedly invokes for racialized subjectivity. — connects to: Encountering the Other reveals the for-itself having an outside and being embedded in being; A third observer can disarm the Other’s gaze by transcending it in turn; The Other’s gaze imposes unchosen determinations on my being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1229 (+7 more)
• SHARE: The exact Fanon quote — ‘exploded in the gaze… recomposed as another’ — is the passage worth sending to anyone teaching colonial subjectivity.