George Lamming the Existentialist

Abstract

This essay argues that George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin offers important tropes in black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through his portrait of the phenomenon of slime and its correlate, the slimy individual. The author also discusses Lamming’s treatment of the Fanonian motif of colonizing notions of normative development.