IB Philosophy 10.4.2 the Other and the White Gaze Key Definitions

Corporeal fragmentation is Fanon's term for the experience in which the white gaze shatters the unified sense of one's own body, replacing it with a racially coded collection of parts. Where a person normally inhabits their body as a seamless whole, the colonized person under the white gaze experiences their body as broken into racialized features carrying stereotyped meanings imposed by the colonial order.

Fanon's term for the set of racial meanings that the white colonial world projects onto the Black body, overlaying and displacing the neutral bodily schema described by Merleau-Ponty. Unlike a body schema that arises from one's own lived movement and perception, the historico-racial schema is imposed from outside and carries the accumulated weight of slavery, colonialism, and racist ideology.

In Fanon's philosophy, the Other is the colonized Black person constructed as fundamentally different and inferior by the white colonial world, produced through racial domination rather than neutral difference.

Fanon's concept of triple consciousness extends Du Bois's double consciousness, describing the condition in which the colonized Black person must simultaneously maintain awareness of their own experience, the white world's racial perception of them, and the historical meanings that colonialism has attached to blackness.

The white gaze is the totalizing look through which the colonial world perceives the Black person, reducing them to racial appearance and denying their individuality, interiority, and freedom.