![]() The Wretched of the Earth was published in December 1961, shortly after his death from leukaemia at the age of 36. A Dying Colonialism, published in 1959, is an account of the personal and collective changes that become possible within a mass struggle. Fanon’s name is frequently invoked in the new student struggles for the decolonisation and deracialisation of the country’s universities.įanon’s next two books were written in Tunis where he worked for the Algerian national liberation movement in exile. In the parts of South African society that retain a colonial character, such as some universities, it remains a book with a real charge. It had an explosive impact on South Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when, along with thinkers like James Cone, Aimé Césaire and Jean-Paul Sartre, Fanon became an important part of the intellectual foundation of the black consciousness movement.Ĭontemporary readers often continue to experience their first encounter with the book as electric and transformative. The book deals with the lived experience of racism in the Caribbean and France.Īll these years on it remains a foundational text in the growing body of literature in the field of critical race studies. Today, the most visible legacy of the Algerian war in South Africa is the ubiquity of the name and, arguably, to a lesser extent, ideas of one of the major intellectuals whose thought was forged, in large part, in the crucible of that war.įrantz Fanon’s name is mobilised in the service of all kinds of political projects, some of which are in obvious contradiction to both the books that he wrote as well as what we know of his biography.įanon, born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925, published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952 at the precociously young age of 27. By 1963, activists in South Africa were being subjected to methods of torture learnt from the French in Algeria. The apartheid state also sought to learn from the war in Algeria. … the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority. He went on to spend some time with guerrillas in the mountains of Algeria. In 1961, Nelson Mandela, in search of military training, was hosted by the Algerian army in exile in Morocco. Guevara declared Algiers “one of the most heroic capitals of freedom”. After the war, grand figures on the global stage – such as Malcolm X and Che Guevara – made their way to Algeria. Torture and rape were routine features of French military operations.Īlongside the revolution in Cuba in 1959, the Algeria war for national liberation inspired struggles against racism and colonialism around the world. Massacres were common, extending in 1961 to the mass killing of unarmed Algerian civilians in Paris. Independence followed a hard-fought revolutionary war that began in late 1954 and ended six years later. It also influenced the evolving forms of repression and resistance in apartheid South Africa. The bitter struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s became a central focus of the global movement against colonialism. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.Algeria marks its 53rd year of independence from France this month. Fanon is a political martyr who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. He also wrote a third book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), as well as numerous medical journal articles and political essays, a selection of which appear in the posthumous collections Toward the African Revolution (1964) and Alienation and Freedom (2015).ĭespite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and decolonization has remained vital, influencing a range of academic fields such that the term Fanonism has become shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. ![]() He published two seminal books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), respectively. ![]() Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a philosopher of anti-colonial revolution. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital outside Washington, DC. Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
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