Frantz Fanon
He was born in Martinique, studied psychiatry in France, and spent his life analyzing what colonialism does to the mind, and what it takes to undo it.
Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in France and then went to Algeria to practice, where he found his patients' illnesses inseparable from the violence of colonial rule. Black Skin, White Masks analyzed the psychological damage of colonialism on the colonized: the internalization of the colonizer's gaze, the splitting of identity, the longing to be recognized as human by the one who denies your humanity. The Wretched of the Earth went further: colonialism is violence, and decolonization cannot avoid its return. He died of leukemia at thirty-six, in 1961, the year Algeria gained independence. He had lived to see the beginning of what he had argued for, and written the text that generations of liberation movements would carry. His diagnosis of the colonial psyche remains, sixty years later, the most precise account of what occupation does to people on both sides of the line.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”
“The colonist makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his metropolis, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that metropolis.”
Works
Life & Moments
Joins the Algerian revolution
In 1956, Fanon resigned his post as head of the Blida-Joinville Hospital and joined the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale). He had spent years treating both Algerian patients and French soldiers who had tortured them. The contradiction became intolerable. He became the FLN's ambassador to Ghana and one of the revolution's leading theorists.
The Wretched of the Earth dictated while dying
Diagnosed with leukemia in 1960, Fanon dictated The Wretched of the Earth in ten weeks. He was flown to the Soviet Union, then to the United States for treatment, and died in Washington in December 1961, aged thirty-six, weeks after the book was published in France. The preface Sartre wrote is almost as famous as the book itself.
Influence
Influenced by
- Karl Marx
Fanon extended Marxist analysis of alienation and class to the specific situation of colonialism: the colonized person is not merely exploited economically but psychologically unmade. The struggle is for consciousness, not just conditions.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, connecting Fanon's analysis to his own account of freedom, authenticity, and the violence of dehumanization. Fanon drew on Sartre's existentialism to articulate colonial subjectivity.
- Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy and Gandhi exchanged letters from 1909 until Tolstoy's death in 1910. Gandhi credited The Kingdom of God Is Within You with producing a 'radical transformation' in him, displacing both Bentham and Mill. Tolstoy's insistence that nonviolent resistance is not passive but requires greater courage than violence shaped the entire tradition of civil disobedience.
- W.E.B. Du Bois
Fanon cited Du Bois's concept of double consciousness as a predecessor to his own analysis of the colonized psyche, the internal split produced when the colonized person must see themselves through the colonizer's eyes. Both argued that this psychological damage precedes and shapes economic and political oppression.
Influenced
- Steve Biko
Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks was central to Biko's development of Black Consciousness. Both argued that the colonized person internalizes the colonizer's view of them, and that liberation therefore requires a prior psychological revolution. Biko applied this analysis specifically to the apartheid context.
- Enrique Dussel
Dussel takes from Fanon the insistence that the colonized are not a special case within an otherwise general theory but the place from which the theory has to be rewritten.
