Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is the central text of what has come to be known as critical philosophy of race, where attention has tended to focus on the fifth chapter, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’. This chapter was originally published in Esprit in 1951 as a stand-alone essay, a fact that gave some legitimacy to the reading of it in isolation (Fanon 1951). But when Black Skin, White Masks was published in the following year, it became apparent that it was not representative of the whole work. ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’ highlights the white gaze that racialises blacks and rejects some of the backward-looking strategies promoted by the Négritude movement, especially those associated with Léopold Sédar Senghor, where the future is said to lie in reviving ‘a black civilization unjustly ignored’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 201). The chapter ends in tears: ‘I began to weep’ ([1952] 2008, p. 119). By contrast, the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, ‘In Guise of a Conclusion’, while continuing the theme of refusing to find salvation in the past, draws most heavily on those parts of the book that are affirming and future-oriented. Indeed, the book's penultimate chapter, ‘The Black Man and Recognition’, ends by saying ‘No’ to contempt and indignity and a resounding ‘Yes’ to life, love and generosity ([1952] 2008, p. 197).

The second half of that same chapter is entitled ‘The Black Man and Hegel’, and it is the place where Fanon engages with the famous lord–bondsman dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977). These few pages (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. 191–97) are the main focus of the essays by Philippe Van Haute, Ulrike Kistner and Josias Tembo in this book. The essays by Ato Sekyi-Otu and Reingard Nethersole mainly address dialectics in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004), while Beata Stawarska establishes the link between Fanon's first book and his last. Taken together, they form a valuable corrective to the pessimistic reading of Fanon that has come to dominate much of the current literature. But they do much more than this.