His written works have become central texts in Africana thought, in large part because of their attention to the roles hybridity and creolization can play in forming humanist, anti-colonial cultures. Hybridity, in particular, is seen as a counter-hegemonic opposition to colonial practices, a non- assimilationist way of building connections across cultures that Africana scholar Paget Henry argues is constitutive of Africana political philosophy.
Tracing the development of his writings helps explain how and why he has become an inspirational figure firing the moral imagination of people who continue to work for social justice for the marginalized and the oppressed.
While the attention to oppression of colonized peoples that was to dominate his later works was present in this first book, its call for a new understanding of humanity was undertaken from the subject-position of a relatively privileged Martinican citizen of France, in search of his own place in the world as a black man from the French Caribbean, living in France.
Table of Contents 1. Biography 2. Decolonization Theory 4. Movements and Thinkers Influenced by Fanon 6. References and Further Reading 1. Primary Sources 2. Secondary Sources 1. Members of this social stratum tended to strive for assimilation, and identification, with white French culture. After the war, he stayed in France to study psychiatry and medicine at university in Lyons.
Although he briefly returned to the Caribbean after he finished his studies, he no longer felt at home there and in , after a stint in Paris, he accepted a position as chef de service chief of staff for the psychiatric ward of the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria.
Working in a French hospital, Fanon was increasingly responsible for treating both the psychological distress of the soldiers and officers of the French army who carried out torture in order to suppress anti-colonial resistance and the trauma suffered by the Algerian torture victims.
Already alienated by the homogenizing effects of French imperialism, by Fanon realized he could not continue to aid French efforts to put down a decolonization movement that commanded his political loyalties, and he resigned his position at the hospital.
Once he was no longer officially working for the French government in Algeria, Fanon was free to devote himself to the cause of Algerian independence. That same year, he took up a diplomatic post in the provisional Algerian government, ambassador to Ghana, and used the influence of this position to help open up supply routes for the Algerian army. It was in Ghana that Fanon was diagnosed with the leukemia that would be his cause of death.
He died two months later, on December 6, , reportedly still preoccupied with the cause of liberty and justice for the peoples of the Third World. At the request of the FLN, his body was returned to Tunisia, where it was subsequently transported across the border and buried in the soil of the Algerian nation for which he fought so single- mindedly during the last five years of his life. It is only through development of this latter perspective that the black man or woman can shake off the psychological colonization that racist phenomenology imposes, Fanon argues.
One of the most pervasive agents of phenomenological conditioning is language. In Peau Noire, Fanon analyzes language as that which carries and reveals racism in culture, using as an example the symbolism of whiteness and blackness in the French language—a point that translates equally well into English linguistic habits.
One cannot learn and speak this language, Fanon asserts, without subconsciously accepting the cultural meanings embedded in equations of purity with whiteness and malevolence with blackness: to be white is to be good, and to be black is to be bad. Fanon describes a decision made by the revolutionary forces in Algeria in to give up their previous boycott of French and instead start using it as the lingua franca that could unite diverse communities of resistance, including those who did not speak Arabic.
The subversive effects of adopting French extended beyond the convenience of a common language; it also cast doubt on the simplistic assumption the French colonizers had been making, namely, that all French speakers in Algeria were loyal to the colonial government.
Where it is found at all in the work of black feminist writers, this allegation tends to be more tentative, and tends to be contextualized within a pluralist inventory of phenomenological approaches. Just as Fanon selects race as the founding category of phenomenology, a feminist phenomenology would focus on gender as a founding category.
But Fanon does not simply diagnose the political symptoms of the worldview within which black men and women are dehumanized. This assertion, that all of us are entitled to moral consideration and that no one is dispensable, is the principled core of his decolonization theory, which continues to inspire scholars and activists dedicated to human rights and social justice.
Both the Algerian and Haitian declarations are powerful decolonizing moves because they undermine the very Manichean structure that Fanon identifies as the foundation of the colonial world. It has been described as a handbook for black revolution.
The book ranges over the necessary role Fanon thinks violence must play in decolonization struggles, the false paths decolonizing nations take when they entrust their eventual freedom to negotiations between a native elite class and the formers colonizers instead of mobilizing the masses as a popular fighting force, the need to recreate a national culture through a revolutionary arts and literature movement, and an inventory of the psychiatric disorders that colonial repression unleashes.
Part of its shocking quality, from a philosophical perspective, is alluded to in the preface that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote for the book: it speaks the language of philosophy and deploys the kind of Marxist and Hegelian arguments one might expect in a philosophy of liberation, but it does not speak to the West. It is Fanon conversing with, advising, his fellow Third-World revolutionaries. Although this philosophy of black pride was a potent counterbalance to the assimilation tendencies into which Fanon had been socialized, it was ultimately an inadequate response to an imperializing culture that presents itself as a universal worldview.
Movements and Thinkers Influenced by Fanon The pan-Africanism that Fanon understood himself to be contributing to in his work on behalf of Third World peoples never really materialized as a political movement. The attempt to generate political solidarity and meaningful political power among the newly independent nations of Africa instead foundered as these former colonies fell victim to precisely the sort of false decolonization and client-statism that Fanon had warned against.
Today, as a political program, that ideal of small-state solidarity survives only in the leftist critiques of neoliberalism offered by activists like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.
Brazilian theorist of critical pedagogy Paulo Freire engages Fanon in dialogue in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, notably in his discussion of the mis-steps that oppressed people may make on their path to liberation.
Like Fanon, he recognizes that language has a dual character. It colonizes in the sense that power congeals in the history of how language is used that is, its role in carrying culture. Existential phenomenologist Lewis R. Gordon works to articulate the new humanism that Fanon identified as the goal of a decolonized anti-racist philosophy. The Frantz Fanon Prize recognizes excellence in scholarship that advances Caribbean philosophy and Africana-humanist thought in the Fanonian tradition.
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Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Frantz Fanon — A Basic Bibliography. Patrick S. A short summary of this paper. His works have become influential in the fields of [colonial and] post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2nd ed. Translating Fanon Across Continents and Languages. New York: Columbia University Press, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression.
New York: Plenum Press, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Zalta ed. Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co. Black Skin, White Masks. The Wretched of the Earth. A Dying Colonialism. Toward the African Revolution. Gibson, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Young, eds.
Alienation and Freedom. London: Bloomsbury Academic, in French, Le Sueur, ed. Journal Reflections on the French-Algerian War. Fanon: A Biography. New York: Grove Press, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study.
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