Frantz Fanon — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925 into a middle-class family, and was taught at the lycée by Aimé Césaire. At eighteen he left the island to fight with the Free French forces in Europe, was wounded and decorated, and encountered the racism of the army he had volunteered for — a disillusion that shapes everything he wrote. He studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon, where he also attended lectures by Merleau-Ponty, and published Black Skin, White Masks at twenty-seven. In 1953 he became head of the psychiatric department at Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria, where he treated both Algerian torture victims and French torturers. He resigned in 1956, joined the FLN, wrote for its paper, and served as an ambassador for the provisional Algerian government. He was diagnosed with leukaemia and died in the United States in 1961 at thirty-six, weeks after finishing The Wretched of the Earth.

The Wretched of the Earth

1961 (Les Damnés de la Terre)

The argument

The book opens with the claim that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon, and that the colonial world is a world cut in two, maintained not by consent but by the police officer and the soldier, so that the native's first encounter with the settler is an encounter mediated by force. Fanon then turns on the colonised elite: the national bourgeoisie which inherits the state at independence, having no productive function, becomes an intermediary for foreign capital, and nationalism without social programme collapses into a mimicry of the departed rulers. He argues that the peasantry and the urban lumpenproletariat, not the unionised elite, carry revolutionary potential. Later chapters treat national culture, arguing against a purely retrospective celebration of tradition, and close with case notes from his psychiatric practice documenting the mental disorders produced by colonial war on both sides.

Reception and critique

The chapter on violence is the most quoted and the most misread. Fanon's argument is descriptive and psychological as much as prescriptive: colonial rule is itself constituted by violence, and the colonised subject's violence is presented as the reversal through which a dehumanised person recovers agency. Hannah Arendt and others read this as a glorification of bloodshed, and Sartre's preface, considerably more enthusiastic about violence than Fanon's own text, did much to fix that reading. Later postcolonial theory has drawn less on the political programme than on the psychoanalytic account in Black Skin, White Masks — the internalisation of the coloniser's gaze, the scene of the child on the train saying look, a Negro — which Bhabha and others developed into a theory of colonial subjectivity and mimicry.

Key Concepts

Manichaean colonial world

Colonialism divides space and humanity absolutely into settler and native, a compartmentalised world held together by force.

Internalised racism

The colonised subject absorbs the coloniser's evaluation of them, producing the desire to be white and the psychic split of Black Skin, White Masks.

Violence as reversal

Colonial rule is founded on violence; anti-colonial violence is analysed as the means by which the dehumanised reclaim agency, not as a moral good in itself.

The pitfalls of national consciousness

At independence the national bourgeoisie substitutes itself for the coloniser and becomes an agent of foreign capital rather than of the people.

National culture

Culture cannot be recovered by simply returning to precolonial tradition; it must be produced in the struggle itself.

Why Fanon Matters

Fanon is the founding theorist of postcolonial studies, read by every writer in the field and by the independence movements themselves — Ali Shariati translated him in Iran, the Black Panthers adopted him, and Steve Biko drew on him in South Africa. Black Skin, White Masks supplied the psychoanalytic account of colonial subjectivity that Bhabha, Said, and Spivak all work from or against, while The Wretched of the Earth remains the sharpest analysis of what goes wrong after independence. For examinations he is the necessary starting point: almost every term in postcolonial theory can be traced to a problem he posed first.

Key Facts

Taught by Aimé Césaire

His lycée teacher in Martinique was the poet and Negritude founder, a formative influence he later argued with.

Treated both sides in Algeria

As head of psychiatry at Blida he treated Algerians tortured by the French and the French officers who tortured them.

Sartre's preface

Sartre's 1961 preface was more emphatic about violence than Fanon's text, and shaped the book's reception for decades.

Died at thirty-six

He completed The Wretched of the Earth while dying of leukaemia and did not live to see Algerian independence.

All Major Works

Black Skin, White Masks1952
A Dying Colonialism1959
The Wretched of the Earth1961
Toward the African Revolution1964