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= The zone of non-being = In his seminal book, Black Skin, White Masks (originally published in 1952 in France as Peau Noire, Masques Blanc), Frantz Fanon described the world as being divided into two compartments - the zone of being and the zone of non-being. In his own words, Fanon describes the zone of non-being as "an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born" (1986, p. 10). As he furthermore puts it, the zone of non-being is the "real hell" (p. 10) where blackness is brutally confronted with its state in a largely anti-Black world. Alienation from blackness causes the black subject to once again slip into the zone of non-being. The zone of non-being can be understood or read in two ways - the first suggests that it "could be limbo, which would place blacks below whites but above creatures whose lots are worse" whilst the second suggests that "it could simply mean the point of total absence, the place most far from the light that, in a theistic system, radiates reality, which would be hell". "The zone of being and zone of non-being are not a specific geographical places, but rather a position within racial structures of domination that operate at a global scale between centers and peripheries, but that are also manifested at a national and local scale against diverse groups considered as racially “inferior.” Zones of being and zones of non-being exist at a global scale between Westernized centers and non-western peripheries (global coloniality). But zones of being and zones of non-being also exist not only inside of the metropolitan centers (internal racial/colonial subjects in urban zones, regions, ghettoes, segregated communities, etc.), but also within the peripheries (internal colonialism). The zones of non-being within a metropolitan or peripheral country are the zones of internal colonialism."

Fanon's philosophical efforts are indebted to his dedication to black subjects who are wrapped up in a world which incarcerates and locates them in the positionality of the Other. Fanon announces at the onset that black subjects find themselves not regarded as human beings. In fact, this realm of non-being is equated to that of 'less-than-Being'. Group identity is connected to a given institution, group, or place of origin one belongs to. As such, [https://www.ifsw.org/displaced-persons/#:~:text=Displacement%20is%20a%20social%20phenomenon,displacement%20of%20individuals%20and%20groups. displaced persons] promptly lose their group identity when they are uprooted from the known and become non-beings, all in an attempt to fit into their new place and space. Displacement often becomes the place and space where belonging overrules being. When displaced persons find themselves in a zone of non-being, their personhood, identity, worth and dignity is denied by others around them and eventually they deny it themselves, resulting in them taking on a completely new group identity. Fanon acknowledges that specific sociopolitical institutions or structures prevent some racial groups from being or realizing "themselves" in the way they envision it. Fanon refers to "non-being" or, more precisely, "the zone of non-being" when he discusses the state or circumstance of not being able to realize oneself.

Decolonial thinkers, like Fanon, advance an expansive academic argument that "since the dawn of modernity, the modern world order has remained bifurcated into ‘zone of being’ (where colonialists and their descendants live) and the ‘zone of non-being’ where the colonized and their descendants have been confined by coloniality and its colonial matrices of power" (p. 1). The colonized, when relegated by the zone of non-being due to being declared evil, is freed from all duties to the colonizer, leading them to reformulate the most basic divisions of life accordingly. Class, sexual, gender, or national/colonial oppressions may be intertwined in the zone of non-being, but this is fundamentally different from how these oppressions are experienced and expressed in the zone of being. Racial oppression in the zone of not-being exacerbates the other oppressions. The zone of nonbeing is unstable and nourishing at the same time, trapping the disintegrated ego in a never-ending struggle between opposing poles of existence—emergent selfhood and racial objectification. To date, many members of the black majority are trapped in this state of non-being, where they are generally ignored and ostracized to the advantage of the white political minority.