Overdetermined from the Outside

"I am overdetermined from the outside," Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), describing the moment in a French city when a child pointed at him and named him by his skin. In that instant, Fanon had been sealed into an identity not his own: the system had already decided what he was before he could decide it for himself. The word overdetermined does exact work—it means there is no degree of freedom left, no signal the person might send that has not already been assigned a meaning by a system that decided what he was in advance. He had thought of himself as a man, a physician, a veteran, a reader of philosophy. The gaze collapsed all of it into a single category. To be overdetermined from the outside is to be made an object: fixed, classified, reduced to a type,