Frantz Fanon

FRANTZ FANON

“Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and political theory, and its influence across the global South has been wide, deep, and enduring. In his lifetime, he published two key original works: Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) in 1961. Collections of essays, A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution Algérienne 1959) and Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution Africaine), posthumously published in 1964, round out a portrait of a radical thinker in motion, moving from the Caribbean to Europe to North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa and transforming his thinking at each stop.

Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria, where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry at Bilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society”.

Biography Source

Texts by FanonTexts about FanonVideos on Fanon

“The Wretched of the Earth” (1961)

Citation: Fanón, Frantz. “The Wretched of the Earth.” (1961).
Info: “Frantz Fanon’s seminal work on the trauma of colonization, “The Wretched of the Earth” made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom.”

“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)

Citation: Fanón, Frantz. “Black Skin, White Masks.” (1952)
Info: “First published in 1952, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is one of the most important anti-colonial works of the post-war period. It is both a profound critique of the conscious and unconscious ways in which colonialism brutalises the colonised, and a passionate cry from deep within a black body alienated by the colonial system and in search of liberation from it”.

“A Dying Colonialism” (1959)

Citation: Fanón, Frantz et al. “A Dying Colonialism.” (1959).
Info: “An incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order to destroy those same oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression”.

“Toward the African Revolution” (1964)

Citation: Fanón, Frantz et al. “A Dying Colonialism.” (1959).
Info: “This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation. These pieces display the genesis of some of Fanon’s greatest ideas — ideas that became so vital to the leaders of the American civil rights movement.”

“Alienation and Freedom” (2018)

Citation: Fanon, Frantz. “Alienation and Freedom.” (2018).
Info: “Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage”.

"Frantz Fanon and the Negritude Movement: How Strategic Essentialism Subverts Manichean Binaries" (2013) by Cynthia Nielsen

Citation:Nielsen, Cynthia R. "Frantz Fanon and the Négritude Movement: How Strategic Essentialism Subverts Manichean Binaries." Callaloo, vol. 36 no. 2, 2013, p. 342-352. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.2013.0084.
Info: "In this text, Nielsen argues that Fanon’s employment of essentialized narratives can be interpreted as a variant of (what Spivak calls) strategic essentialism. In short, Fanon, like Césaire, understood that different historical moments require different resistance strategies".

“The Assumption of Negritude: Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics” (2002) by Robert Bernasconi

Citation: Bernasconi, Robert. “The Assumption of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics.” Parallax, vol. 8, no. 2, 2002, pp. 69–83., doi:10.1080/13534640210138946.

"Fanon at 90"
"Why Frantz Fanon Matters for Today's Struggles: Part 1"
"Why Frantz Fanon Matters for Today's Struggles: Part 2"
"Fanon on the Question of Species: Humanism as Restlessness"
"Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality"
"Reading Fanon in the 21st Century"
"Frantz Fanon on Colonialism and the Question of Decolonization of the Third World"
"Frantz Fanon's Philosophy of Resistance"
"Frantz Fanon and Lesson from A Not So Dying Colonialism"