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

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.