Frantz Fanon

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The Algerian political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) analyzed the nature of racism and colonialism and developed a theory of violent anticolonialist struggle.

Frantz Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique. He volunteered for the French army during World War II, and then, after being released from military service, he went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry from 1945 to 1950. In 1953 he was appointed head of the psychiatric department of a government hospital in Algeria, then a French territory. As a black man searching for his own identity in a white colonial culture, he experienced racism; as a psychiatrist, he studied the dynamics of racism and its effects on the individual.

In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon examined the social and psychological processes by which the white colonizers alienated the black natives from any indigenous black culture; he showed that blacks were made to feel inferior because of their color and thus strove to emulate white culture and society. Fanon hoped that the old myths of superiority would be abandoned so that a real equality and integration could be achieved.

Alienated from the dominant French culture, except for that represented by such radicals as the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, Fanon deeply identified with Algeria's revolutionary struggle for independence. He had secretly aided the rebels from 1954 to 1956, when he resigned from the hospital post to openly work for the Algerian revolutionaries' National Liberation Front (FLN) in Tunis. He worked on the revolutionaries' newspaper, becoming one of the leading ideologists of the revolution, and developed a theory of anticolonial struggle in the "third world."

Using Marxist, psychoanalytic, and sociological analysis, Fanon summed up his views in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), arguing that only a thorough, truly socialist revolution carried out by the oppressed peasantry (the wretched of the earth) could bring justice to the colonized. He believed that the revolution could only be carried out by violent armed conflict; only revolutionary violence could completely break the psychological and physical shackles of a racist colonialism. Violence would regenerate and unite the population by a "collective catharsis;" out of this violence a new, humane man would arise and create a new culture. Through all this Fanon stressed the need to reject Europe and its culture and accomplish the revolution alone.

Fanon, the antiracist and revolutionary prophet, never saw the end result of the process he described: full independence of his adopted Algeria. In 1960 he served as ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, but it was soon discovered that he had leukemia. After treatment in the Soviet Union, he went to the United States to seek further treatment but died there in 1961.

Further Reading

Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), is a useful biography. David Caute, Fanon (1970), is not a full biography but a study of Fanon's ideas. Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961; trans. 1965) has an interesting introduction by Jean Paul Sartre. For a concise background of Algeria see Richard M. Brace, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia (1964).

Additional Sources

Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi., Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression, New York: Plenum Press, 1985.

Gendzier, Irene L., Frantz Fano, London: Panaf Books, 1975.

writer; theorist; psychologist

Personal Information

Born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique; died on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda, MD; married Josie Duble, 1952 (died 1989); children: one son
Education: Studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France, after World War II.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in Free French Army during World War II.

Career

Writer, 1952-61; Bilda-Joinville Hospital, Bilda, Algeria, head of services, 1953-56; Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center Jour de Tunis, Tunisia, psychiatrist, 1957-59; All African Peoples' Congress, participant, 1958; revolutionary polemicist, undercover agent, late 1950s; Algerian Provisional Government, ambassador to Ghana, 1960.

Life's Work

When Frantz Fanon's revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth appeared in the United States in 1965, it quickly became a bestseller. The book's publisher called it the handbook for black revolution, and African-American militants and other young American leftists took its message to heart: a widely quoted statement attributed to two different leaders of the radical Black Panther group, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, held that "every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon." The Wretched of the Earth advocated the violent overthrow of the European and American colonial presence in Third World countries. "Violence," Fanon wrote, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."

As the revolutionary ideology of the late 1960s and early 1970s faded, however, even the Algerian people on whose behalf Fanon worked for much of his adult life would forget his celebrity. Fanon's extreme statements seemed outdated to young people seeking societal change, and conservative Western writers mentioned his name with either irritation or outright dismissal. Yet, even as many of the politically radical pronouncements of the 1960s had come to seem quaint or innocent, Fanon's writings inspired a resurgence of interest in the 1990s and 2000s. Fanon, a psychiatrist, crossed disciplines in his life and his writings, always striving to make connections between his insights into the effects of racism and the concrete political steps that poor people needed to take to bring about change.

Fought for France in WWII

Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony. His parents were better off than most of the island's African-descended population, which consisted largely of sugar-plantation workers, and he received a strongly French-oriented education. Fanon's teachers emphasized that Martinique was part of France and that he should consider himself a Frenchman--yet he also became aware of racism early on, for it was clear that a black Frenchman did not have the same stature as a white Frenchman. "On that small island a cultural schizophrenia was born," noted Chicago Sun-Times writer Hazel Rowley.

Fanon's childhood was outwardly uneventful, but he had an intense temperament that showed itself as World War II broke out in 1939. In one of the few statements Fanon made about his own life, he wrote, according to the Independent's Deborah Levy, that "I arrived in the world, anxious to extract meaning from things." When he was 17, Fanon sneaked away from home and sailed to the Caribbean island of Dominica, scraping together the money for his adventure by selling clothing coupons that belonged to his father. From there, Fanon made his way to France and joined the guerrilla fighters who were resisting the occupying forces of Nazi Germany.

Fighting on the French side for much of the war, Fanon spent time in French-colonized Algeria, on Africa's Mediterranean coast. The disparity in living standards between Algeria's European inhabitants and its native Arab population made an impression on Fanon, but the battle against German fascism remained uppermost in his mind. Fanon was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French equivalent of the Purple Heart, for bravery during his service in the Free French forces. Yet Fanon experienced racism on an ongoing basis while serving in the military, even in France, where he noticed that white French women refused to dance with the black soldiers who had fought to liberate them. The hurts of Fanon's childhood surfaced, and he recalled thinking, according to Declan Kiberd of the Irish Times, that "this isn't your war. When whites kill each other, it's a blessing for blacks."

Became a Psychologist

After the war's end in 1945, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in the French city of Lyon. He was fascinated by the radical ideas of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and by African writers intent on freeing their countries from European colonialism and defining a new black identity. Fanon married a young French woman of similar convictions in 1952; the couple had one son, and they remained together as Fanon moved to Africa and became enmeshed in revolutionary struggle. Fanon's wife Josie declined to discuss their marriage later on in her life.

Completing his psychiatric training, Fanon wrote his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, in 1952. It was ignored at the time, but after Fanon's death it was hailed as a masterpiece of psychology that investigated how racism induced black people to emulate their oppressors. The book was translated into English as Black Skin, White Masks, and was published in 1967. The book exerted a great influence over U.S. promoters of the idea of black consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, and it remains, along with The Wretched of the Earth, one of Fanon's most widely read works.

Tired of living in France and feeling trapped by the stereotyping he experienced from Europeans he encountered, in 1953 Fanon accepted a post as the head of a government psychiatric hospital in the Algerian town of Blida, a suburb of the capital of Algiers. Here, Fanon began to feel an increasing kinship with Algeria's urban Arab poor. Applying group therapy methods pioneered by French psychoanalyst François Tosquelles, Fanon, an atheist and foreigner who did not speak Arabic, began to win the trust of Arab and Islamic patients whom other French doctors had sent away.

Fought for Algerian Independence

In 1954, Algerians revolted against their French overlords. Although other African countries gained independence without bloodshed during this period, France responded to the Algerian insurrection with brutal repression that included widespread instances of torture and physical abuse. These events touched off the final stage in Fanon's political radicalization, and he began secretly helping the rebel Front de la Liberation Nationale or FLN. Fanon received death threats from the French and their sympathizers, but his resolve only strengthened. In the words of writer Aimé Cesaire, quoted by Levy in the Independent: "He chose. He became Algerian. Lived, fought and died Algerian." Yet Fanon, as a government-employed psychiatrist, also had to treat French troops, and he is not known to have betrayed his personal patients to the rebel cause.

Early in 1957, the French colonial government exiled Fanon to newly independent Tunisia. The move may have lengthened his life, for Fanon had become ensnarled in factional conflicts inside the Algerian rebel movement, and one of his closest friends had been murdered. Fanon pursued an activist life in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, and his fame spread. Speaking on behalf of African independence movements, he traveled around the continent. He served an ambassador for the Algerian rebel movement's provisional government, traveling to Ghana for the All-African Peoples' Conference of 1958 and circulating through the French colonies and former colonies of West Africa. Fanon founded a magazine called Moudjahid in Tunis and became more and more prolific as a writer himself.

His 1959 book L'an cinq de la révolution algérienne was a series of essays that expounded on his ideas about a new Africa free from colonial rule and called for armed resistance to French power. Another group of Fanon essays of the period was collected after his death and published as Pour la révolution africaine. Not an armchair philosopher, Fanon put his ideas into practice and worked to aid Algerian resistance fighters. He was wounded near the Tunisian-Algerian border in 1957 and survived several attempts on his life.

Wrote Wretched of the Earth Before Death

Fanon undertook a 1,200-mile intelligence-gathering trip from Mali to the Algerian border in 1960, reporting back to his comrades-in-arms on French troop deployments. By the time he arrived back in Tunis, he was seriously ill, and soon he was diagnosed with leukemia. Fanon foresaw his approaching death and worked furiously on what would be his final book, Les damnes de la terre, published in English as The Wretched of the Earth. Its unbridled call-to-arms style may have been partly rooted in the fact that Fanon, who could not type, dictated the book onto tape; it has the rhythms of incendiary speech rather than written prose.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon called for a violent revolution on the part of the world's dispossessed peoples. He was not an orthodox Marxist, in that he saw no need for a revolutionary vanguard of the Communist sort; instead, he believed, revolution should arise spontaneously among the poor of the Third World themselves, from "the wretched of the earth." The political independence sought by Algeria and other African countries was in Fanon's opinion only a first step toward the overturning of Western exploitation in a wide range of human activities. Fanon's ideas aroused controversy, but some observers pointed out that his calls for violence should be seen in the context of the violence he had already witnessed and experienced in Algeria.

Fanon sought treatment for his illness in the Soviet Union. In 1961, possibly aided by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officers intent on learning what he knew about leftist revolutionary movements, he checked into a National Institute of Health hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. There, at the heart of Western power, he completed The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon died on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda. He did not live long enough to see Algeria gain independence from France. Lionized by 1960s radicals, Fanon was less well regarded as revolutionary ideas fell out of favor with European and American intellectuals. A film biography, Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Mask and a new print biography, David Macey's Frantz Fanon: A Life, testify to continuing interest in one of the twentieth century's most unusual figures and most gifted revolutionary writers.

Works

Selected works

• Peau noire, masques blancs, Editions du Seul, 1952; published as Black Skin, White Masks, Grove, 1967.
• L'An V de la révolution algerienne, F. Maspero, 1959; published as A Dying Colonialism, Grove, 1967.
• Les Damnes de la terre, F. Maspero, 1961; published as The Wretched of the Earth, Grove, 1965.
• Pour la révolution africaine: Ecrits politiques, F. Maspero, 1964; published as Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1967.

Further Reading

Books

• Gordon, Lewis R., et al., eds. and trans., Fanon: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1996.
• Macey, David, Frantz Fanon: A Life, Picador, 2001.

• Chicago Sun-Times, July 22, 2001, p. 16.
• Independent (London, England), November 18, 2000, p. 10.
• Irish Times, January 20, 2001, p. 74.
• New York Times, September 2, 2001, Section 7, p. 11.
• Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 5, 1997, p. L30.
• Washington Post, July 8, 2001, p. T9.

• "Frantz Fanon," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet.BioRC (February 16, 2004).

• Julien, Isaac, dir., Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Mask (film), Normal Films, 1996.

— James M. Manheim

(1925-61) Theorist of revolution whose ideology is most clearly enunciated in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. Born in Martinique, he studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. He joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria in 1956, later serving as diplomatic representative in several African states. To Fanon colonialism was a system of racial oppression all the more insidious because its impact was mental as well as physical, distorting attitudes and behaviour alike. Genuine liberation could not therefore be achieved by peaceful negotiation, as was attempted elsewhere in Black Africa in the 1960s, but only as a result of protracted violence involving direct, collective action by the masses as in Algeria. Even then Fanon had reservations about nationalist movements, on account of their privileged, urban, middle-class leadership, susceptible to colonial penetration. The only reliable revolutionary force was the peasantry, with nothing to lose and retaining the capacity for spontaneous protest and explosions of violence. Fanon died of leukaemia before Algeria finally acquired its independence in 1962.

— Ian Campbell

Fanon, Frantz (1925-61). Martinican-born psychoanalyst, theorist of anti-imperialist revolution. Born into a lower-middle-class family of mixed racial origin, Fanon was educated at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France (where one of his teachers was Aimé Césaire), and came to political consciousness in an island colony controlled in the name of the Vichy regime by the French navy. In 1943 he escaped, at the third attempt, from Martinique to the neighbouring island of Dominica, whence he joined the Forces Françaises Libres. He subsequently fought with them in Morocco, Algeria, and France, gaining the Croix de Guerre in 1945. Between 1947 and 1951 he studied medicine, specializing in psychiatry, at the University of Lyon, and in 1952 published his seminal work on the psychology of racism and ‘race relations’, Peau noire masques blancs. Heavily influenced by Freud, Jung, Hegel, and Sartre, the work begins as a humanistic or rationalist investigation, but reaches authentically revolutionary conclusions.

Fanon married a Frenchwoman, José Dublé, in 1952 and, after a short period as psychiatric intern at Pontorson in Normandy, was appointed psychiatric consultant at the Hôpital Blida-Joinville in Algeria in 1953. A sympathizer with the FLN from the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, Fanon resigned from his psychiatric post in 1956 in order to devote himself entirely to the insurgent cause. Expelled from Algeria by the French in January 1957, he went to Tunisia where he worked as a psychiatrist and also contributed regular articles to the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid, which are reprinted, along with other writings, in the posthumous Pour la révolution africaine (1964). In 1959 a searching analysis of the sociology and psychology of the war in Algeria, L'An Cinq de la révolution algérienne, was banned by the French government, and in the same year an attempt was made on Fanon's life in Rome, where he had gone for medical treatment following injury in a land-mine explosion on the Tunisian-Algerian border.

In 1960 Fanon was chosen to represent the Gouvernement Provisoire Algérien in Ghana, but fell ill and, in December 1960, was diagnosed as suffering from incurable leukaemia. Following treatment in Moscow, he returned to Tunisia and there, in the space of ten weeks, wrote his last and most influential work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961), in which he argues not only that colonialism cannot be overthrown without violence but also, and still more controversially, that only violent struggle can truly liberate colonized humanity from the multiple psychological alienations from which it suffers. It was published shortly after his death with a preface by Sartre. Translated into English as The Wretched of the Earth, the work had a massive influence on anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles throughout the world, not least in the United States where it was an inspirational text of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Though its conclusions concerning violence seem increasingly questionable, its analysis of the social psychology of colonialism remains unsurpassed.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• D. Caute, Fanon (1970)
• J. McCullough, Black Soul White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (1983)
• H. A. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985)

Fanon, Frantz (1925-61) French psychologist and theorist of colonialism. Born in French Martinique, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in France after the Second World War. His Peau noire, masques blancs (1952, trs. as Black Skin, White Masks, 1967), analysed the deforming effect of colonialism on both black and white peoples. His best-known work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961, trs. as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), legitimizes the violence necessary to overthrow the established structural violence of colonialism, and had great influence on the emerging black radicalism of the following decades.

1925-1961

Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique and died on December 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C. He is best known for his work in fighting against colonization.

Fanon was the son of a native Martiniquan father (the descendant of slaves and a member of the island's middle-class community), and a French (Alsace) mother (herself the daughter of a mixed marriage). Between 1939 and 1943 he studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he was taught by Aimé César, a poet who helped destroy the image of the African created by European colonization. In 1943, then a young man, Fanon became a dissident and agitated against representatives of the Vichy regime in the Antilles. He traveled to the island of Dominica to rally the free French forces in the Caribbean. In 1944 he fought on the European front. Wounded near the Swiss border, he received a citation for his courage, signed by Colonel Raoul Salan, whom he would later fight against in Algeria.

After receiving his baccalaureate at the special session of March 1946, he went to Lyon, France, to study medicine (1946-1951). After a brief stay in Martinique at the end of 1951, he returned to Lyon to specialize in psychiatry under the direction of Professor Tosquelles. There he met Octave Mannoni. The two men became friends, but Fanon was highly critical of Mannoni's Psychologie de la Colonisation (Psychology of colonization). He became a psychiatrist in June 1953. In 1954 he was appointed to a post in Blida, Algeria. He saw patients during the day and, at night, participated in the struggle for Algerian independence. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957. At the end of the summer of 1958, Fanon settled in Tunis to resume his double life. He died in 1961 from leukemia.

He developed an interest in psychoanalysis fairly early in his career; he speaks of it in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1967a), published when he was twenty-seven. His attitude is that of a colonized subject who, disappointed by racism, grows skeptical of European universalism. Yet he began this work with the following statement: "Only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes." Fanon saw Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung as more or less the same. His form of psychoanalysis is more of a social therapy based on liberation than of a talking cure.

His ideas, as represented in his books—Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965a), The Wretched of the Earth (1965a), and Toward the African Revolution (1967b)—can be summarized as follows: There is a specific pathology associated with colonization. The core of the emotional disturbances affecting black people is an inferiority complex, in the Adlerian sense. The Oedipus complex does not occur in families from the Antilles. The unconscious, as described by Jung, is collective. Analysis of the social-historical development of the individual must take precedence over any other approach. Freud, Jung, and Adler were not thinking about black people when they formulated their theories. He rejected the idea of determinism, believing that humankind was abandoned to its own fate.

He was unable to overcome his resistance to psychoanalysis at the time of his premature death at the age of thirty-six.

Bibliography

Cherki, Alice. (2000). Frantz Fanon, portrait. Paris: Seuil.

Fanon, Frantz. (1965a). Studies in a dying colonialism (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1958) ——. (1965b). The wretched of the earth (Constance Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1961) ——. (1967a). Black skin, white masks (Charles Lam Markmann, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952) ——. (1967b). Toward the African revolution: Political essays (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1964)

—GUILLAUME SURÉNA

1925 - 1961

French West Indian psychiatrist, author, and ideologue of the Algerian Revolution.

A black man born in 1925 on the French Antilles island of Martinique, Frantz Fanon became the best-known theoretician of the Algerian revolution and, through it, one of the best-known theoreticians of African liberation in general. The child of middle-class parents, Fanon spent the early years of his life attempting to be French. During World War II, however, humiliating experiences of racism in the Antilles and in North Africa and Europe, where he served in the French armed forces, made him increasingly aware of the anomalies confronted by a black man in a world dominated by whites.

After the war Fanon went home to Martinique, but in 1947 he returned to France and entered medical school. He received a degree from the University of Lyons in 1951. In July 1953 he passed his Médicat de hôpitaux psychiatrique and, in November 1953, he accepted a position as chief of staff (chef de service) in the Blida-Joinville Hospital, the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria.

While serving at Blida, Fanon treated many patients suffering from the pressures of their colonized status and from the trauma of the revolutionary situation. He came to the conclusion that the resentment that had brought about the Algerian revolution was of the same order as the resentment he had come to feel as a black man in a white world. In 1956, Fanon resigned his medical post and secretly joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front). Receiving in January 1957 a "letter of expulsion" from the colonial authorities, he fled to Tunis, where the FLN was beginning to establish its headquarters. There he became an editor of al Moudjahid, the official organ of the FLN, served in FLN medical centers, and became a roving ambassador to solicit support for Algeria in African countries. In December 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He died of that illness a year later in Bethesda, Maryland.

Fanon wrote three books. The earliest, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black skin, white masks), appeared in 1952. It diagnoses the psychologically dependent status of Caribbean blacks and suggests ways for them to transcend that dependency and discover self-possession and authenticity. The second, L'an V de la Révolution Algérienne (Year 5 of the Algerian revolution), was written in great haste in 1959 and is essentially a sociology of the revolution. In it, Fanon describes the transformation of Algerian society brought about by individuals' decisions to revolt. In revolting against colonial oppression, militants also revolt against patriarchal and other oppressions. Out of these individual decisions, a nation of free men and women is born, a process that cannot be reversed. Fanon's last book, Les Damnés de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth), was published in 1961. It takes up many of the themes of the preceding works, but with greater urgency. Fanon insists that it is only through violence that colonialism can be defeated and the native overcome his dependency complex. Native bourgeoisies must also be overturned, because they are in a state of permanent dependence upon the West. The Algerian revolution is the model for global revolution, because it represents a peasant revolution led by a genuinely popular party. A fourth book, Pour la Révolution Africaine (For the African revolution), a collection of articles written during Fanon's Moudjahid period, was published after his death.

Bibliography

Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology ofOppression. New York: Plenum, 1985.

Geisner, Peter. Fanon. New York: Dial, 1971.

Gendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

— JOHN RUEDY

Quotes:

"When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."

"Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent."

"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."

"There is a point at which methods devour themselves."

"What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary."

Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon on the cover of an English translation of Les damnés de la terre
Born	July 20, 1925 (1925-07-20) Martinique
Died	December 6, 1961 (1961-12-07)
Citizenship	French
Influences Aimé Césaire, négritude, György Lukács
Influenced Edward Said, Ali Shariati, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, Huey P. Newton Bobby Seale

Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization.^[1] His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Martinique and World War II 1.2 France 1.3 Algeria 1.4 Death 2 Work 3 Influences 4 Influence 5 References in the arts 5.1 Music 5.2 Contemporary Art 5.3 Cinema 5.4 Literature 5.5 Theater 6 Bibliography 6.1 Fanon's writings 6.2 Books on Fanon 6.3 Films on Fanon 7 References 8 External links

Biography

Martinique and World War II

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French département. He was born into a mixed family background: his father was the descendent of African slaves, and his mother was said to be an illegitimate child of mixed race, whose white ancestors came from Strasbourg in Alsace. Fanon's family was socioeconomically middle-class^[1], and they could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, then the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where famed poet Aimé Césaire was one of his teachers.^[3]

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique. Forced to remain on the island, French soldiers became "authentic racists."^{[citation needed]} Many accusations of harassment and sexual misconduct arose. The abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Army was a major influence on Fanon, as it reinforced his feelings of alienation and his disgust at the realities of colonial racism. At the age of eighteen, Fanon fled the island as a "dissident" (the coined word for French West Indians joining the gaullist forces) and traveled to then-British colony Dominica to join the Free French Forces. He later enlisted in the French army and joined an Allied convoy that arrived in Casablanca. He was later transferred to an army base at Bejaia on the Kabyle coast of Algeria. Fanon left Algeria from Oran and saw service in France, notably in the battles of Alsace. In 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de Guerre medal. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany, along with photo journalists, Fanon's regiment was "bleached" of all non-white soldiers and Fanon and his fellow Caribbean soldiers were sent to Toulon (Provence) instead.^{[citation needed]} Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation home.

In 1945 Fanon returned to Martinique. His return lasted only a short time. While there, he worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire, who would be the greatest influence in his life. Although Fanon never professed to be a communist^{[citation needed]}, Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a parliamentary delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed long enough to complete his Baccalaureate and then went to France where he studied medicine and psychiatry. He was educated in Lyon where he also studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures. During this period he wrote three plays, whose manuscripts are now lost. After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry at Saint-Alban under the radical Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the important yet often overlooked role of culture in psychopathology. After his residency, Fanon practiced psychiatry at Pontorson, near Mont St Michel, for another year and then (from 1953) in Algeria. He was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he stayed until his deportation in January 1957.

His service in France's army (and his experiences in Martinique) fueled Black Skin, White Masks. For Fanon, being colonized by a language had larger implications for one's political consciousness: "To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (BSWM 17-18). Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French.

France

While in France, Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the effect of colonial subjugation on humanity. This book was originally his doctoral thesis submitted at Lyon and entitled, "The Disalienation of the Black Man". The rejection of the thesis led to Fanon seeking to have the book published. It was the left wing philosopher Francis Jeanson, leader of the pro-Algerian independence Jeanson network, who insisted on the new title and also wrote an epilogue for this publication.

Algeria

Fanon left France for Algeria, where he had been stationed for some time during the war. He secured an appointment as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. It was there that he radicalized methods of treatment. In particular, he began socio-therapy which connected with his patients' cultural backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954 he joined the FLN liberation front (Front de Libération Nationale) as a result of contacts with Dr. Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955.

In The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre), Fanon later discussed in depth the effects on Algerians of torture by the French forces. His book was then censored by France.

Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabyle region, to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. His lost study of "The marabout of Si Slimane" is an example. These trips were also a means for clandestine activities, notably in his visits to the ski resort of Chrea which hid an FLN base. By summer 1956 he wrote his famous "Letter of resignation to the Resident Minister" and made a clean break with his French assimilationist upbringing and education. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957 and the "nest of fellaghas [rebels]" at Blida hospital was dismantled. Fanon left for France and subsequently traveled secretly to Tunis. He was part of the editorial collective of El Moudjahid for which he wrote to the end of his life. He also served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government (GPRA) and attended conferences in Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo and Tripoli. Many of his shorter writings from this period were collected posthumously in the book Toward the African Revolution. In this book Fanon reveals himself as a war strategist; in one chapter he discusses how to open a southern front to the war and how to run the supply lines.

Death

On his return to Tunis, after his exhausting trip across the Sahara to open a Third Front, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He went to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced some remission of his illness. On his return to Tunis he dictated his testament The Wretched of the Earth. When he was not confined to his bed, he delivered lectures to ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale) officers at Ghardimao on the Algero-Tunisian border. He made a final visit to Sartre in Rome and went for further leukemia treatment in the USA. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, on December 6, 1961 under the name of Ibrahim Fanon. He was buried in Algeria, after lying in state in Tunisia. Later his body was moved to a martyrs (chouhada) graveyard at Ain Kerma in eastern Algeria. Fanon was survived by his wife Josie (maiden name Dublé, who committed suicide in Algiers in 1989), their son Olivier and his daughter (from a previous relationship) Mireille. Mireille married Bernard Mendès-France, son of the French politician Pierre Mendès-France.

Work

Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks while still in France, most of his work was written while in North Africa. It was during this time that he produced works like, L'An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne, or Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, later republished as 'Sociology of a Revolution" and later still as 'A Dying Colonialism'. The irony of this was that Fanon's original title was "Reality of a Nation", however the publisher, Francois Maspero, refused to accept this title. He also wrote an important work on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth^[4]. The Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 by François Maspero and has a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.^[5] In it Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century.

Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals such as Esprit and El Moudjahid.

The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are recognized to contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work, including his doctoral thesis, has received little attention. As a result, Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work ignores the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. For Fanon in "The Wretched of the Earth", the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based sheerly on military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only 'language' the colonizer speaks. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature.^{[citation needed]}

His participation in the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) from 1955 determined his audience as the Algerian colonized. It was to them that his final work, Les damnés de la terre (translated into English by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the Earth) was directed. It constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist/globalized world^[6].^{[citation needed]}

Influences

Much of Fanon's writings is traced to the influence of Aimé Césaire. But, while it could be said that Fanon's works are directly influenced by the Négritude movement, Fanon reformulated the theory of Césaire and Léopold Senghor by positing a new theory of consciousness. Négritude implicitly based consciousness in racial difference and tension. Fanon's psychological training and experience influenced him to base much of the problems he saw as psychological and as the product of the domination which arises in oppressive colonial situations. That is, consciousness was not of "racial essence" but a fact arising from political and social situations. Fanon's consciousness was not purely black, but extended to colonized peoples of any racial category. Fanon's own explanation of the difference between his theory and that of Blaise Diagne, Senghor and Césaire was based in an evolutionary model where the colonized ideologies transition from assimiliationist, négritude, and finally Fanon's own theory.^[7]

Influence

Fanon has had an inspiring impact on anti-colonial and liberation movements. In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in the United States and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba. Of these only Guevara was primarily concerned with Fanon's theories on violence; for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and "black consciousness" respectively ^[8]. Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others. More recently, radical South African people's movements have been influenced by Fanon's work.^[9] His work was a key influence on Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, as well.

References in the arts

Fanon has become a hero to many people, both as a theorist influenced by négritude and as an advocate of resistance and revolution, especially with relation to violence in revolution. Often, he is mentioned mostly as a symbol that the artist is familiar with the works of classic writers in the struggle against colonialism^{[citation needed]}.

Music

Rage Against the Machine makes reference to Fanon ("grip tha canon like Fanon and pass tha shell to my classmate") in a track entitled "Year of tha Boomerang" on their 1996 release Evil Empire. The Wretched of the Earth appears on the inside of the album cover. This use of Fanon in the context of an advocate of violent insurrection can be compared to the use by Rage Against the Machine lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, a track recorded with artists Last Emperor and KRS-One called "C.I.A. (Criminals In Action)." The lyric is: "I bring the sun at red dawn upon the thoughts of Frantz Fanon, So stand at attention devil dirge, You'll never survive choosing sides against the Wretched of the Earth."

• The Coup track 'Dig it' equally makes reference to Fanon: "Knew that I was doomed since birth to be the Wretched of the Earth"

• Another lyrical reference to Fanon was made by Digable Planets. Digable Planets refer to Fanon in their rap-jazz cut "Little Renee" from the Coneheads motion picture soundtrack.

• Michael Franti wrote in the song, "Keep Me Lifted" (from album Chocolate Supa Highway), the lyrics: "Franz Fanon, the Wretched of the Earth, home, phenomenon be going on and on."

Contemporary Art

Jimmie Durham, an American Indian conceptual artist, references Fanon's postcolonial thought in a piece entitled "Often Durham Employs..." (1998), with this quote from Fanon- "The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers."

Cinema

British film maker Isaac Julien made a 1995 film mixing interviews of Fanon's relatives and friends with fictionalized incidents of his life.

In Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, the main character Remy, who suffers from a terminal cancer, reunites with his old friends in a cottage where they all remember their intellectual and sexual exploits in life. At one point Remy's friend Claude says "we read Fanon and became anti-colonialists."

American filmmakers Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas reference Fanon's work, in their 2007 anti-colonial queer film, Homotopia.

Argentine film-makers and founders of 'Grupo Cine Liberacion', Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, were influenced by Fanon's theories and used quotations from his work in their film 'La Hora de los hornos' (1968).

Literature

American author Philip Roth references Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth in his novel American Pastoral, including the work in a long list of revolutionary literature that the protagonist's daughter reads. Included in the novel is the famous passage from Fanon's work about Algerian women.

Theater

Fanon appears as a character in British playwright Caryl Churchill's "The Hospital At The Time of The Revolution."

Bibliography

Fanon's writings

• "The Fact of Blackness"(1952)
• Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Charles Lam Markmann (1967 translation of the 1952 book: New York, Grove Press)
• A Dying Colonialism
• The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Constance Farrington (1963 translation of the 1961 book: New York, Grove Weidenfeld)
• Toward the African Revolution, transl. Haakon Chavalier (1969: New York, Grove Press)

Books on Fanon

• Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, "Frantz Fanon And The Psychology Of Oppression" (1985: New York NY, Plenum Press) ISBN 0-306-41950-5
• Alice Cherki, "Frantz Fanon. Portrait" (2000: Paris, Seuil)
• Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (2001: New York, NY, Crossroad 8th Avenue) ISBN 0-8245-2354-7
• Nigel C. Gibson [ed.], Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (1999: Amherst, New York, Humanity Books)
• Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003: Oxford, Polity Press)
• Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995: New York, Routledge)
• Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, & Renee T. White [eds.] Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996: Oxford, Blackwell)
• Azzedine Haddour [Ed. and introduced], "The Fanon Reader" (2006: London, Pluto Press)
• David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000: New York, NY, Picador Press) ISBN 0-312-27550-1
• Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (1996: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press)
• T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998: Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.)

Films on Fanon

• Isaac Julien, "Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask" (a documentary) (1996: San Francisco, California Newsreel)
• Christian Filostrat Interviews Frantz Fanon's Wife Josie, November 16, 1978, Howard University’s African-American Center.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Jennifer Poulos. "Frantz Fanon". Emory University. Archived from the original on 2008-06-17. http://www.webcitation.org/5YeIdZauE. Retrieved 2008-06-17. 
2. ^ Benjamin Graves. "Frantz Fanon: an Introduction". Political Discourse - Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. National University of Singapore. Archived from the original on 2008-06-17. http://www.webcitation.org/5YeJPpD1u. Retrieved 2007-02-14. 
3. ^ Petri Liukkonen (2002). "Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)". Archived from the original on 2008-06-17. http://www.webcitation.org/5YeKOT6P7. Retrieved 2008-06-17. 
4. ^ Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Preface". Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Charles Lam Markmann (1967: New York, Grove Press)
5. ^ "Extraits de la préface de Jean-Paul Sartre au «Les Damnés de la Terre» (Extracts from the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to The Wretched of the Eeath)" (in French). Tambour Journal. http://www.tanbou.com/1996/SatreExtraits.htm. Retrieved 2007-02-14. 
6. ^ Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions. Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? [...] It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity. And in the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the stratification and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men. So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her." The wretched of the earth - "Conclusions"
7. ^ Lambert (1993), page 258
8. ^ Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, & Renee T. White [edd] Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996: Oxford, Blackwell) p 163 & Bianchi, Eugene C. The Religious Experience of Revolutionaries (1972 Doubleday) p 206
9. ^ See the paper in the C.L.R. James journal by Richard Pithouse at: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/C.L.R.%20James%20Journal.pdf and also Nigel C. Gibson (2008)'Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers' movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)',Social Identities,14:6,683 — 715 at http://abahlali.org/files/uprightandfree.pdf

External links

• Fanon and the Cultural Unconscious
• (fr) Frantz Fanon : the cause of colonized peoples

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