Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, FrantzOmar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers inblack Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle.His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, andpolitical theory, and its influence across the global South has beenwide, deep, and enduring. In his lifetime, he published two keyoriginal works:Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire,masques blancs) in 1952 andThe Wretched of the Earth(Les damnés de la terre) in 1961. Collections of essays,A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolutionAlgérienne 1959) andToward the AfricanRevolution (Pour la revolution Africaine), posthumouslypublished in 1964, round out a portrait of a radical thinker inmotion, moving from the Caribbean to Europe to North Africa tosub-Saharan Africa and transforming his thinking at each stop. The2015 collection of his unpublished writings,Écrits surl’aliénation et la liberté, will surelyexpand our understanding of the origins and intellectual context ofFanon’s thinking.

Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect,sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time,and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria,where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry atBilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerianrevolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations ofblackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism,anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture andsociety. Fanon published in academic journals and revolutionarynewspapers, translating his radical vision of anti-colonial struggleand decolonization for a variety of audiences and geographies, whetheras a young academic in Paris, a member of the Algeria NationalLiberation Front (FLN), Ambassador to Ghana for the Algerianprovisional government, or revolutionary participant at conferencesacross Africa. Following a diagnosis and short battle with leukemia,Fanon was transported to Bethesda, Maryland (arranged by the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency) for treatment and died at the NationalInstitute for Health facility on December 6, 1961.

• 1. The Problem of Blackness
• 2. Algeria
• 3. Black Africa
• 4. The Wretched of the Earth
• 5. The Case Studies
• 6. Legacy and Influence
• Bibliography
  • Primary Sources
  • Selected Secondary Sources
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Problem of Blackness

In 1952, Fanon published his first major workBlack Skin, WhiteMasks. Though just 27 at the time of its publication, the workdisplays incredible literacy in major intellectual trends of the time:psychoanalysis, existentialism, phenomenology, and dialectics, as wellas, most prominently, the early Négritude movement and U.S.based critical race work in figures like Richard Wright. Modest inlength, the book is notable for its enormous ambition, seeking tounderstand the foundations of anti-Black racism in the deepestrecesses of consciousness and the social world. The book isFanon’s major work on blackness. In fact, his focus shifts inthe years following the publication ofBlack Skin, WhiteMasks, moving away from blackness as a problem—perhapsthe problem—of the modern world and toward a widertheory of the oppressed, colonialism, and revolutionary resistance tothe reach of coloniality as a system. But that shift is unthinkablewithout Fanon’s early meditations on anti-Black racism.Fanon’s reflections on anti-Black racism and how it forms, thendeforms, the subjectivity of white and Black people both, is crucialfor understanding the multiple levels of colonial subjugation and theterms of its overcoming. There is something about anti-blackness astreated inBlack Skin, White Masks that is a concrete,uncomplicated distillation of coloniality as such. Fanon’s firstbook, then, can be said to set out the basic structure of his anti-and de-colonial work, initially and emphatically in the terms ofdescribing the effects and affects of anti-black racism.

Fanon’s method inBlack Skin, White Masks is acomplicated question and one of the more interesting bits of scholarlydiscussion. The primary approach in the text isexistential-phenomenological, something borne out in the rich,textured personal narratives that seize upon the essential structuresof the narrativized event of anti-blackness, and also indicated in thetitle of the fifth chapter—L’experiencevécu (experience vécu translates the keyphenomenological notion ofErlebnis, properly rendered in theRichard Philcox translation as “lived-experience”). LewisGordon’s work on Fanon has argued for the centrality ofexistentialism and existential framing of key questions across hisoeuvre, especially in Gordon’s early workFanon and theCrisis of European Humanity (1995) and recently inWhat FanonSaid (2015). The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and MauriceMerleau-Ponty also lends credence to the phenomenologicalcharacterization, but Fanon’s sustained engagement with theNégritude movement, psychoanalysis, Hegelian thought, andMarxism (something evidenced most clearly in later works anddocumented in Reiland Rabaka’s multi-volume interpretation ofFanon, Négritude, and revolutionary Africana theory) opens upthe question of methodology to any number of interpretations andremains one of the more engaging areas of Fanon-interpretation. HomiBhabha’s innovation as a reader of Fanon has been to draw outthe post-structuralist dimensions of his thought, thereby weavingFanonian themes into contemporary postcolonial theorizations ofhybridity, language, subjectivity, and time. We see much the same inAnthony Alessandrini’s provocative book on Fanon and culturalstudies,Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics (2014),which puts Fanonian thinking in dialogue with Michel Foucault, EdwardSaid, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy, among others. In the end,Fanon is a unique thinker who blends personal narrative andpolitical strategizing with heady social theory and numerousphilosophical twists and turns.

The introduction toBlack Skin, White Masks contains keyconclusions and foundational pieces of analysis summed upFanon’s simple declaration: that Black people are locked inblackness and white people are locked in whiteness. As well, Fanonoffers a sketch of the relationship between ontology and sociologicalstructures, asserting that the latter generate the former, which, inturn, lock subjectivities into their racial categories. The chaptersthat follow are in many ways a long, sustained argument for theseassertions, venturing into questions of language, sexuality,embodiment, and dialectics. Perhaps most importantly, Fanon’sopening gambit introduces the central concept of the zone ofnon-being. The zone of non-being is the “hell”, as Fanonputs it, of blackness honestly confronted with its condition in ananti-Black world. The anti-Black world, the only world we know, hidesthis non-being to the extent that it ascribes a place and role toabject blackness. But the truth is the zone of non-being. In aninteresting and crucial twist, Fanon, in the Introduction, does notdescribe descent into this zone as nihilism or despair. Rather, hecounters with a vision of subjectivity as “ayes thatvibrates to cosmic harmonies” (1952 [2008: 2]). Descent into thezone of non-being produces thisyes and its revolutionarypower, revolutionary precisely because the anti-Black world cannotcontain or sustain the affirmation of Black life as life, as being, ashaving a claim on the world. This claim and thisyes is thepositivity of what becomes political violence in Fanon’s laterwork.

Across the core chapters ofBlack Skin, White Masks, Fanondraws together the existential experience of racialized subjectivityand the calculative logic of colonial rule. For Fanon, and this iscritically important, colonialism is atotal project. It is aproject that does not leave any part of the human person and itsreality untouched. This is no more evident than in the opening chaptertoBlack Skin, White Masks on language. Fanon’sreflections on language, racism, and colonialism begin with a wideclaim: to speak a language is to participate in a world, to adopt acivilization. The claim reflects in many ways the philosophical milieuof mid-century French and German philosophy, which in phenomenology,existentialism, and hermeneutics explore the very sameclaim—that language, subjectivity, and reality are entangled asa matter of essence, not confusion or indistinction. But the colonialsituation makes this all the more complicated. If speaking a languagemeans participating in a world and adopting a civilization, then thelanguage of the colonized, a language imposed by centuries of colonialdomination and dedicated to the elimination or abjection of otherexpressive forms, speaks the world of the colonizer. To speak as thecolonized is therefore to participate in one’s own oppressionand to reflect the very structures of your alienation in everythingfrom vocabulary to syntax to intonation. It is true that manyAfro-Caribbeans speak pidgin and creole as part of everyday life. ButFanon, in a claim that does not age well in Caribbean theory, measurespidgin and creole expression against French, arguing thatAfro-Caribbean speaking, in those registers, is a fallen, impoverishedversion of the metropolitan language and thus participates ininferiority. In this way, vernacular speech speaks thecolonizer’s world into existence in naming the colonized asderivative, less than, and fundamentally abject. Caribbean theory fromthe 1970s to the present has largely been dedicated to defending thelegitimacy of creolized language and cultural forms, against Fanon andagainst colonial languages as the measure of being and knowing.

But there is no alternative for Fanon. In one of the most importantmoments of the book, Fanon discusses the problem of diction and racialembodiment. The black person can perfect speech, learn to speakperfect French andsound like a sophisticated Parisian. Thatmight promise a certain kind of liberation from thealienation in and through mastery of proper French. That is, if theblack colonial learns to speak as well as the white Parisian, thenperhaps there can be equal participation in language and its world.Yet, this is impossible because of what Fanon terms theepidermal character of race. To be black and speak withperfect diction is still to be black, and therefore marked as special,unique, and surprising. Fanon’s anecdotes in the opening chapterdescribe this as the surprise of white French people at thearticulateness of a black French speaker. Surprise is a reminder ofinferiority, not in the content of one’s presence, but rather onthe bearing black skin has on the white mask of perfect diction. Thereis no escape from the epidermal skin. Embodiment frames linguisticperformance and limits its significance. Fanon also remarks on howthis fated-to-failure emphasis on diction in turn alienates the blackperson from his or her fellow black people—the desire to bewhite, Fanon’s characterization of the drive to perfect diction,means alienation from blackness and this lands the black subject,again, in the zone of non-being.

The second and third chapters ofBlack Skin, White Maskstheorize interracial sexuality, sexual desire, and the effects onracial identity. Fanon’s theorizations return to one and thesame theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in thedesire to be white or to elevate one’s social, political, andcultural status in proximity to whiteness. In that sense, alldepictions of interracial sexuality (exclusively heterosexual) are forFanon fundamentally pathological. The black woman who desires a whiteman suffers under the delusion that his body is a bridge to wealth andaccess. Mayotte Capécia’s novelI Am a MartinicanWoman (1948) guides Fanon’s analysis and he takes her bookto be exemplary of the black woman’s psyche and of the limits ofinterracial desire. The black man who desires a white woman suffersunder the delusions of what her body offers: innocence and purity.Fanon draws this from Germaine Guex’s bookLa Névrosed’abandon (1950) and expresses it directly when writing, inthe voice of Guex’s Black man, “When my restless handscaress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignityand make them mine” (1952 [2008: 45]). The white body and Blackdesire for that body function much as language does in the openingchapter toBlack Skin, White Masks: the passage to standingin the world, made impossible by the epidermal racial scheme, andtherefore fated to alienation at every turn. Fanon’s analysesare provocative, associative, and infused with the language ofpsychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology. And, thus, in each turnof the story, interracial desire is pathological, not because of thecontent of the characters and their desire, but because anti-Blackcolonialism is a total project that has infiltrated, modified, andcalcified all aspects of the lifeworld.

The incredibly important fifth chapter toBlack Skin, WhiteMasks, titled “The Lived-Experience of the Black Man”(“L’expérience vécue du noir”), isbookended by two chapters examining psychological accounts of thecolonized. In the fourth chapter, Fanon undertakes a systematiccritique of Octave Mannoni’s psychoanalytic account of colonialoppression and in the sixth chapter he works through a psychoanalyticaccount of racialized libidinal economy. Both chapters are crucial forunderstanding the role of psychoanalysis in Fanon’s thought, aswell as an opportunity to see his creativity as a reader whorepurposes colonial or colonial-tinged methods and analyses for thesake of clarification of the effects of anti-Black racism undercolonial domination. Fanon’s conclusions are not surprising, ofcourse. Psychoanalysis, like his original readings of interracialrelationships, provides Fanon a language for describing all theeffects and affects on desire under anti-Black racism, and howgendered notions of power, embodiment, and selfhood are structuredfrom the inside by the colonial practice of racism. What heuncovers in his critique and repurposing of psychoanalysis are newlayers of pathology on the part of the colonizer, of course, but alsoof the colonized who cannot function as intact psyches. As well, Fanonargues in some detail against the capacity of European psychoanalysisto understand the colonial situation. Blackness requires modificationsin method, especially if that method is to open space for resistance,rebellion, and liberation.

But “The Lived-Experience of the Black Man” is really thekey chapter in the book. In that chapter, Fanon deploys the conceptualtools developed in previous chapters in order to debunk the remaininglegacies of racial essentialism. A good bit of this was undertaken inthe first chapter, where Fanon critically reads AiméCésaire and his articulation of Négritude around thequestion of language. The existential-phenomenological character ofthe fifth chapter, however, adds real depth and texture toFanon’s position. It begins and returns repeatedly to ananecdote in which a white child points to Fanon and declares“Look, a Negro!” Fanon explores how this phrase is akin toa racial slur, how racism is integral to the declaration itself ratherthan being an addition to it: to say “Negro” is to say ananti-Black slur. In developing this account, Fanon revisits Jean-PaulSartre’s account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity ofthe other, here infusing that account with a rich treatment of thestructures of an anti-Black racist lifeworld. The white gaze fixesblackness, making it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealingblackness into itself. As well, Fanon discusses Sartre’s accountof anti-Semitism inAnti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of theEtiology of Racism (1948), noting how it is inadequate to thephenomenon of anti-Blackness as a form of racism. Whereas theanti-Semite fears the Jew because of his alleged power andsuper-capacity, the anti-Black racist detests the Black person becauseof his alleged weakness and incapacity. That is, anti-Semitismreflects a panic about Jewish superiority, anti-Black racism reflectscontempt for Black inferiority. With this complex in place, Fanonreturns with some important sympathy to Césaire’s versionof Négritude, exploring the limits and possibilities of poetryfor an alternative vision of Black life. Négritude may benaïve and fundamentally wrong at the level of ontology, but itdoes alter the affective relation of Black people to themselves. Thatis no small accomplishment. Across these discussions, Fanon developshis notion of the inferiority complex, which is his subtle andimportant account of how anti-Black racism is internalized by Blackpeople and how that internalization adds complexity to the pathologiesof living under colonial rule. Négritude, whatever its limits,is an antidote and Fanon’s appreciation for it is one of themore compelling parts of the chapter.

The seventh and final full chapter offers a critical reading ofdialectics, filtered through both Alfred Adler’s psychology andG.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. At stake in the chapter isrecognition—recognition of blackness, of subjectivity, andtherefore of humanity. This is one of the most enigmatic ideas inBlack Skin, White Masks. Fanon is deeply critical ofdialectical thinking, while at the same time drawing deep, importantlessons from it. In particular, Fanon is concerned with how adialectics of recognitionmight simply mean elevation of theBlack person to a sense of humanity created by and modeled on whitepeople. The entirety of the text, of course, has been dedicated todisputing that move and offering alternative ways of thinking aboutthe future. So Fanon rejects the nascent, or sometimes explicit,conception of recognition that appeals to a pre-constructed idea ofthe human—suspicious, rightly, that such an idea is alwaysracialized. And so too he is suspicious of any dialectical method thatleaves a sense of measure intact—namely, a dialectical methodthat proceeds from a logic of recognition. Fanon resists at every turnthe desire for recognition if that recognition proceeds from aninevitably colonial sense of standard or measure. Rather, in terms ofHegelian methodology, Fanon is interested in the risk of life at thecenter of Hegel’s dialectic, and how that dialectic both exposesthe conceptual dependency of the colonizer on the colonizedand how confrontation, the work of negation in dialecticalthinking and struggle, aims to destroy pre-existing forms of relation.If those pre-existing forms of relation are destroyed, then a certainkind of revolution is possible, one in which the humanity of thecolonized black person might emerge, on its own terms, for the firsttime. Fanon’s imagination turns to the future as unprecedented.What could blackness beafter colonialism?

The conclusion toBlack Skin, White Masks follows through onthis notion of futurity and a dialectics dedicated to the destructionof pre-existing forms of relation. Fanon’s conclusion is writtenin very short paragraphs or provocative, declarative sentences. Acrossthe final pages, Fanon outlines a theory of history and memory thatunderpins his vision of Black liberation, including most prominentlythe notion that we are not bound to history, we are not slaves to thepast, and therefore any kind of future is possible. Fanon rejects theidea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea wouldlink Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that linkinextricable from imagining justice. In place of the past, Fanonappeals to the openness and undetermined character of the future. Whatdoes Fanon want for black people? In perhaps the most famous line ofthe book, Fanon concludes with the plea: “Ô mon corps,fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!” (“O my body,always make me a man who questions!”) (1952 [2008:206]). Subjectivity in the interrogative is therefore Fanon’ssolution to the problem of racial entrapment, the opening motif of howwhite people are trapped in whiteness, black people trapped inblackness. The man who questions has broken out of that trap.

The effusive optimism and hope of the Conclusion aside,BlackSkin, White Masks is an essentially pessimistic book. That is,the book describes a psychological, linguistic, ontological, andlibidinal landscape that is structured through and through byanti-Black racism. No desire or mode of being is left untouched.Fanon’s evocation of a total break with the past in theConclusion confirms this pessimism and shows that his sense ofliberation is tied to an apocalyptic revolutionarypraxis—something we see developed over the following decade.

In the immediate half-decade that follows the publication ofBlackSkin, White Masks, Fanon revisits key claims about anti-blacknessand the possibilities of Black life that enrich, deepen, and widen hisformulations in 1952. One of the questions that arises quite naturallyfromBlack Skin, White Masks is how well, if at all, theconcept of blackness developed therein travels across the Caribbean tothe United States, or from the Caribbean to Africa. Fanon does notspend much time discussing the United States; while some of hisunpublished work, recently collected in the volumeÉcritssur l’aliénation et la liberté, shows a keeninterest in the work of Richard Wright, and the early rustlings of theearly civil rights movement (along with Wright) are mentioned inBlack Skin, Whites Masks, Fanon’s move to refine andnuance his account of blackness turns to Africa. In the 1955 essay“West Indians and Africans” (“Antillais et Africains”),Fanon renews his critique of the Négritude movement and itsnostalgic orientation toward the continent. In a provocativeassociation, Fanon concludes the essay by linking “the greatwhite error” of colonialism with his characterization ofNégritude thinking as “living in the great blackmirage”. (1964 [1994: 27]) Alongside that criticism ofNégritude, Fanon blends personal history, reportage, and a bitof existential-historical sensibility in discussing thedifferences between Afro-Caribbeans (West Indians) and blackAfricans. Fanon’s occasion is the Second World War and theexperience of West Indian and black African soldiers fighting side byside, which allowed intimate exchange about racial identity. Theseexchanges, on Fanon’s account, return again and again to thenotion that West Indians are not Black enough, perhaps not Black atall, which he implies adds to the psychological and moral appeal ofNégritude. A key lesson to draw from this essay, especially inlight of the work that follows it, is that Fanon’s skepticismabout blackness as an identity—inextricably bound toanti-blackness—moves him further and further away from concernsabout the Black experience. This move is deeply connected to his timein Algeria, as we see below.

As well, Fanon’s well-known essay from 1956 “Racismand Culture” (“Racisme et culture”) re-engages the question ofblackness and argues for a deep, abiding connection betweenanti-blackness and cultural formation more broadly. The essay,delivered at one of the most important gatherings in the history ofblack Atlantic thought, the 1956 Congress of Negro Writers andArtists, de-links racism from the psyche and the interpersonal,lodging racism instead inside the very workings ofculture. Fanon’s contribution to the 1956 Congress broke fromthe emphasis on Négritude and Négritude thinking at thatmeeting, and his reflections are noteworthy for that reason alone.Against the emphasis on racial quasi-essentialism, “Racism andCulture” examines how anti-Black racism is part of the structureand function of culture, rather than identifying blackness as aninherent site of resistance. Fanon writes that racism

is never a super-added element discovered by chance in the course ofthe investigation of the cultural data of a group. The socialconstellation, the cultural whole, is deeply modified by the existenceof racism. (1964 [1994: 36])

This move positions Fanon against Négritude in familiar and newways. It is familiar in that he rejects racialized thinking as centralto Black liberation struggle, entwining race and culture at theircore; nothing from a racist culture can inform liberatory racialthinking precisely because the existence of racism “deeplymodifies” what appears in cultureas race. Fanonunderscores this when he deems blues, an African-American vernacularart form, a “slave lament” that is “offered up forthe admiration of the oppressors” (1964 [1994: 37]). It is insome ways new, insofar as he gathers together the multi-facetedanalysis and pessimism ofBlack Skin, White Masks anddistills it all into a vision of race and culture. And like theconclusion toBlack Skin, White Masks, and indeed most of hiswork, the vision is essentially apocalyptic. “The end of raceprejudice”, Fanon writes, “begins with a suddenincomprehension” (1964 [1994: 44]). Which is to say, for Fanonthe de-linking of racism and culture only comes at the moment thatculture itself, as we have known it, becomes incomprehensible and webegin the work of assembling new cultural forms. This insight is fullydeveloped five years later in the central chapters ofThe Wretchedof the Earth.

2. Algeria

Fanon’s move to Algeria in 1953 marks an important turning pointin his thought. He continues to write on anti-blackness in selectessays and occasions, but Fanon’s shift is deep and meaningful.WhereasBlack Skin, White Masks was concerned exclusivelywith the structure of an anti-black world and how that world bears onthe body and psyche of the colonized, Fanon’s time in Algeriaand later travels to sub-Saharan Africa broaden his analysis. Insteadof a question of blackness, colonialism becomes for Fanon a larger,more general question of the oppressed in the global south.TheWretched of the Earth is the boldest and most importantexpression of this shift, but the time he spends analyzing Algeria onits own terms reveals Fanon’s increasing sensitivity todifferenceinside the colonial experience. Also, many of hismost important writings in this period were published in Frenchlanguage newspapers across the continent of Africa, in particular theAlgerian National Liberation Front (FLN) newspaperElMoudjahid (for which he served on the editorial board), whichhosts some of his most interesting reflections. This shift in histhinking, as well as some of the later points of emphasis andtheoretical transitions, bolster Ato Sekyi-Otu’s argument inFanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1997) thatFanon’s work ought to be read as a series of politicalexperiences or stages in and at the basis of an unfolding of a long,complex system of thought.

Three essays are of particular significance in this period:“Algeria’s European Minority” (“La minoritéeuropéenne d’Algérie”), “AlgeriaUnveiled” (“L’algérie se dévoile”), and“The Algerian Family” (“La famillealgérienne”).

Fanon’s reflections in “Algeria’s EuropeanMinority” offer an important and insightful example of applyingthe anti-colonial dimensions ofBlack Skin, White Masks. Thekey anti-colonial insight in that text was how measure—theimperial function of whiteness in the Black psyche—structuresthe world. Liberation, inBlack Skin, White Masks, looks alot like displacing measure in the name of the questioning subject.Measure, here, means simply the ideal or standard according to which“the human” is evaluated. Fanon’s argument inBlack Skin, White Masks is that “the human”, anidea that comes from the European tradition, is a fundamentally racialidea deployed as a tool of alienation for the colonized. Liberationfrom measure means displacing the racialized idea of the human andinitiating a movement toward, then into, anew humanism. Whenthis notion travels to Algeria in “Algeria’s EuropeanMinority”, a critical essay addressing the possibility ofrevolutionary Europeans in North Africa, we see how it also applies tothe white minority under colonialism. The revolution in Algeria is amoment of decision for all Algerians, and pointedly so in the case ofthe European minority who had lived there for generations and at anelevated social and political status. The default mode, of course,would be to associate the European minority with the colonizing power:France. But Fanon argues that this is not necessarily the case andthat, in fact, revolutionary solidarity across racial-national linesis possible, even necessary (and, through examples in the text,actually practiced). Algeria, then, is revealed to be as much anideological category for identification with as it is a national,religious, or racial category.The Wretched of the Earth willexplore these possibilities even further as a blueprint for thecolonized global South. But Fanon is particularly meticulous in“Algeria’s European Minority”, examining in detailhow each twist and turn of the psyche reflects possibilities andlimits, and in that meticulousness shows the enduring insight from theopening ofBlack Skin, White Masks – namely, that whitepeople are locked into whiteness, Black people into blackness.“Algeria’s European Minority” unpacks the process bywhich white people can unlock themselves in or be unlocked byanti-colonial struggle and revolutionary action. In that sense, thetext is an important study of how what comes to be called “racetraitor” politics can and should work in a revolutionarycontext.

In “Algeria Unveiled”, Fanon explores the relationshipbetween Islam, tradition, colonial rule, and revolutionaryconsciousness. The veil puzzles Fanon and challenges his deepestpolitical commitment: postcoloniality means an embrace ofthenew. Revolution is absolute and radical, marking a break with thepast rather than a return to a different version of the past. Thefuture is the future, and so full of the unprecedented. What does thatmean for traditions that have been suppressed by colonial rule, forexample the veil in Islamic cultural practice? In his work onblackness, Fanon was quite clear that a return to Africancivilization—the imperative of the Négritudemovement—represents a mirage and only doubles the loss of thepast by losing black people in an illusion. But that is not the casewith his treatment of Islamic traditions in Algeria and other parts ofthe Maghreb. The suppression of those traditions, on Fanon’saccount, marginalize or push tradition into secret—or, perhaps,keep the tradition in the open, but always as backward, abject, andcontrary to modernity. This means tradition is still alive, not amirage, and as alive also valued deeply by communities resistingcolonial rule. Such traditions can be instrumentalized for the sake ofrevolutionary action, only to be evaluatedafter colonialismfor their suitability in a postcolonial nation and culture. The samelogic is elaborated in “The Algerian Family”, where Fanonexplores the traditional structure of families in Algeria, inparticular how those families set gender identity, power, marriage,and reproduction in fixed roles. Revolutionary families, he argues,identify these fixed roles and break with them whilealsomaintaining a conviction that their practices are Algerian—thatis, Algerian in thenew sense.

These reflections on racial-national identification, religion, gender,and family all return to the same basic argument: revolution is aboutthe new. But that does not mean merely rejecting the past andsuspending all tradition. Rather, it means, for Fanon, identifyingsites for transformation inside tradition, with emphasis on thosesites which offer revolutionary or tactical possibilities. Theseessays and the many shorter companion pieces from the time show Fanonpuzzling over his dual commitments—to a revolution that isalways for the future and to “the people” who are oftendeeply committed to traditions. Thinking through that crossing ofcommitments is the task of any revolutionary thought and Fanon’scareful thinking is exemplary.

3. Black Africa

In terms of volume, Fanon’s turn to Africa in the yearsfollowing the publication ofBlack Skin, White Mask isoverwhelmingly occupied with North Africa, and Algeria in particular.However, he also gives some key attention to sub-Saharan Africa orwhat he called “black Africa” in key essays, editorials,and letters collected inToward the African Revolution.

Though there is some variety in terms of content and particularthematic sites, Fanon’s relationship to sub-Saharan Africa isfairly consistent. The Algerian experience and ideology that emergedfrom it structures Fanon’s take on anti-colonial struggle in theregion, but he does not return to questions of anti-Black racism.Algeria is for Fanon the exemplar of revolutionary struggle. So, whentalking about black Africa, Fanon will urge forgoing deep connectionsto or retrievals of pre-colonial Africa—something that reflectshis early critiques of Négritude, for sure, but are in theselater essays really plainly political and strategic. Africa is,ideologically, aunity for Fanon, and that unity is regularlyarticulated in terms of shared colonial struggle. Thus, the divisionsbetween North and sub-Saharan Africa are erased in a shift ofperspective; memories and grievances that might flow from legacies ofthe Arab slave trade are part of the disposable past. What matters isthe shared condition in the present, and therefore to the future ofunified anti-colonial struggle. In “Unity and EffectiveSolidarity are the Conditions for African Liberation”(“Unité et solidarité effective sont lesconditions de la libération africaine”) (1960), Fanon isplain in writing that “inter-African solidarity must be asolidarity of fact, a solidarity of action, a solidarity concrete inmen, in equipment, in money” (1964 [1994: 173]). All of thesesolidarities reflect an anti-essentialist approach to revolutionarystruggle, which is consonant with Fanon’s work from thebeginning. Also of note is how Fanon, in this context, asserts thenecessity of the neutrality of anti-colonial struggle in Africa withregard to Cold War alliances. The history of post-independence Africa,which was the site of so many proxy wars and destabilization effortsfrom both sides of the Cold War, bears out Fanon’s observationand assertion.

Fanon also pauses to pay special attention to Patrice Lumumba whoin 1961, when “Lumumba’s Death: Could We DoOtherwise” (“La mort de Lumumba: pouvions-nous faireautrement?”) was written, was known as a promising and importantrevolutionary leader. Lumumba immediately after became emblematic ofboth the revolutionary promise and seemingly inevitable neo-colonialfate of independent black Africa. This short essay is full ofinteresting observations, most of which revolve around the failure inCongo to unify around an anti-colonial ideology. The lack of thisideology, he notes, is what made Congo susceptible to Belgian andother European/American meddling, which then made Lumumba a naturaltarget. Lumumba’s bold identification with anti-colonialismenacted what Fanon most wanted: neutrality in the Cold War, singularfocus on the nation and the continent against colonialism in allforms. Lumumba’s death leads to the greatest threat togenuinely independent, anti-colonial Africa: national infightinginstead of continental solidarity and the return of intra-nationalethnic conflict that destabilizes what is most in need ofstabilization.

In the end, it remains unclear how well Fanon understood the diversityof sub-Saharan Africa and its difference from North Africa, where hespent most of his time on the continent and to which his reflectionsare largely dedicated. The occasional pieces leading up toTheWretched of the Earth raise interesting questions and show howFanon was dedicated to building lines of solidarity and sharedstruggle. African unity was paramount in Fanon’s work on thecontinent, and he boldly extends the Algerian experience to thecentral and southern regions of Africa. At the same time, and thisbecomes particularly clear when he reflects on black Africa’smemory of the slave trade, Fanon inThe Wretched of the Earthcalls for a suppression of memory and historical difference in thename of broader solidarity among the continent’s oppressedpeoples. This has the strength of forging a vision of a futurede-linked from the past—a project consistent with therevolutionary conclusion toBlack Skin, White Masks—andyet seems largely unaware of or unconcerned with the consequences offorgetting the historical experiences of large swaths of sub-SaharanAfrica. As well, the difference between settler colonies and thoseadministered from a distance fades a bit when Fanon travels hisreflections to black Africa, a difference that has received a morenuanced treatment in postcolonial theory since Fanon.

That said, work by Nigel Gibson inFanonian Practices in SouthAfrica (2011) and Achille Mbembe inCritique of BlackReason (2013 [2017]) andPolitiques del’inimitié (2016), as well as essays by thinkerssuch as Mabogo Percy More, Richard Pithouse, and others, have placedFanon in critical dialogue with sub-Saharan African politicalrealities and emerging theoretical movements. This is some of the mostexciting contemporary work in Fanon studies and indicates the rich,provocative resources in his work for the twenty-first century.

4. The Wretched of the Earth

Without question, the 1961 publication ofThe Wretched of theEarth (Les damnés de la terre) changedFanon’s global profile as a thinker of anti-colonial struggle,revolutionary action, and post-colonial statecraft andimagination.

In many ways,Wretched is a fulfillment of the short,suggestive promissory notes on anti-colonial struggle found in themany essays, editorials, and letters written in the time followingBlack Skin, White Masks. Those occasional writings and majoressays shift focus away from anti-Blackness as a core theme and towarda broader sense of the effects of colonialism on the psyche, culturalformation, and political organization. That shift in focus allowsFanon to think more broadly about the meaning and purpose ofrevolutionary struggle.

The opening chapter toWretched is surely the most famous, inpart because of the sheer power and provocation of its reflections, inpart because it is the focus of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-knownForeword. Fanon’s concern with violence is critical forunderstanding the trajectory ofWretched, which ambitiouslymoves from political agitation to cultural formation to postcolonialstatecraft to global philosophical re-orientation. It all begins withviolence.

Violence is important for Fanon as a precondition to liberation,something George Ciccariello-Maher inDecolonizing Dialectics(2017) links to a broader concern in Fanon with decolonizingmethodology and revolutionary praxis. Violence as preconditionoperates in two directions: internal to the colony among thecolonizers and external in the formative conflict between thecolonized and the colonizer. Internal to the colony, Fanon breaks thecolonized into three groups. First, there is theworker whoserelationship to both the colonized and colonizer is organized aroundits capacity towork. This is a complicated relationship, onethat is both a relation of dependency (material needs are supplied bythe colonial system) and naturally revolutionary (exploited, yet alsothat upon which the colonizer depends). Second, there is thecolonized intellectual, a compromised figure who plays acrucial role across the body ofWretched, whether in relationto cultural renewal or to political resistance. The colonizedintellectual mediates the relation of the colonized for the colonizer,translating the terms of colonial life into the language, concepts,and thinkable politics of the colonial power. There ispotential in the colonized intellectual, insofar as it is afigure whose epistemological roots cross with the life of thecolonized masses, but any potential is compromised, if not outrightobliterated by the role the intellectual plays: to aid and abet thecolonizer. Third, there is thelumpen proletariat, a termborrowed from Karl Marx’s analysis of the dialectic’sremainder and translated into the conditions of colonialism. Thecolonial lumpen are disposable populations that provide nothing to thecolonial system (displaced people, slum dwellers, subsistencefarmers), and therefore, from the outside, remain the greatest threatto the system. In a certain sense, this is a formalization ofFanon’s earlier reflections on the role of thefellahin colonial Algeria—the group lying outside the system of urbancolonial and anti-colonial struggle, a figure of purity and purerevolutionary power.

Violence emerges as a critical concept in this moment. Part of thecolonizer’s fantasy of power and control lies in a perception ofweakness, of inferiority, that is inherent in the colonized. Thecolonized are weak and therefore, in some fundamental sense, deservetheir abject condition. This is consistent with Fanon’sreflection on the inferiority complex inBlack Skin, WhiteMasks, but writ large and as a characteristic of a population andpeople. If the inferiority of the colonized is anassumptionandpsychological reality of colonial life, thenrevolutionary violence cannot but be a shock to the entire system. Thecolonizer is shocked into awareness of thehumanity of thecolonized in the moment in which they are willing to risk their livesfor another future. The colonized are shocked into awareness of theirown potential and, in that potential, find themselves capable forforming a wide cultural, social, and political identity. Identityformation is critical in Fanon’s analysis; colonialism is atotal project, so the colonized find themselves adrift in abjection.But violence changes all of that. Violence is simultaneously a sayingofno to colonialism and a saying ofyes to thepossibilities of post-colonial life. The system cannot survive thisshock. And so it means everything to the three classes of colonizedlife. The workers see the system on which they are dependent begin tocollapse. Exploitation becomes a site of resistance, rather thansomething to be endured for the sake of material needs. The colonizedintellectual is exposed as counter-revolutionary and a key element inthe oppressive system. And the lumpen find an identity for the firsttime, moving from disposable excess to anti-colonialism’s mostpotent revolutionary force.

Violence is therefore tasked with the greatest of pair of intertwinedtasks: elimination of the colonial system at the level of imagination(how colonizer-colonized relations are naturalized as superiority andinferiority) and of material reality (exploitative relations ofsubordination and extraction), as well as formation of cultural,social, and political identities. The first chapter ofWretched outlines and amplifies this enormous potential ofrevolutionary, anti-colonial violence, and the chapters that followelaborate the complexities of post-colonial formations of culture andpolitics.

The next three chapters explore in great detail how revolutionaryviolence is related to collective identity formation (Chapter Two),consciousness of national identity (Chapter Three), and perhaps mostimportantly the formation of national culture (Chapter Four). What wesee across these chapters is how potent and fecund Fanon’sconception of violence is, as well as how his various meditations onrevolution and identity in the essays between his first and his lastbook pay real conceptual and strategic dividends. Conceptually, Fanondraws the sharpest contrast between what he calls the colonizedintellectual and the revolutionary masses. The colonized intellectualis exactly what the terms suggests: a go-between who translates thecolonized for the colonizer, in the colonizer’s language and forthe political, social, and cultural purposes of the colonizer. Themasses do not drive the colonized intellectual’s reflections,but rather the colonial vision of the world structures everything.Contrasted to that are the revolutionary masses who make anew political, social, and cultural order throughrevolutionary struggle itself. In this characterization, Fanon eschewsvanguardism and all the sorts of elite revolutionary structures thatfollow from it. Rather, for Fanon, struggle itself generatespolitical, social, and cultural identities and concepts; there is noprefiguring this element of a postcolonial world. Revolution makeseverything revolutionary, and the postcolonial state cannot be thoughtwithout it. And so Fanon’s elaboration of this movement alsocriticizes atavistic notions of postcolonial state- and culture-craft,rejecting nostalgic turns to a precolonial African society as a visionfor post-revolutionary society.

If the colonized intellectual and the precolonial forms of life arenot just insufficient for, but actually damaging to, postcolonialworld-making, then the future is a break with the past. Grievancescomposed of memories of historical violence (e.g., the Arab slavetrade in black Africa) or ethno-religious and other cultural disputesgive way to revolutionary action that dispenses with, rather thandraws on, memory. The break with the past, at the level oforganization and intellectual formation, is made through revolutionaryviolence. So too is the future. There is no pre-existing nationalconsciousness or national culture, no genius or visionary whoconceives it ahead of time, which means that revolutionary violencemust be purposeful, intentional, and oriented toward world-making. Inthis way, Fanon’s work on violence is never nihilistic orrandom. Strategically, this means everything because conceptions ofpolitics, culture, and the postcolonial social order hinge on theproper sense of violence.

The Wretched of the Earth concludes with one of Fanon’smost provocative and exciting pieces, evoking in much the same way asthe conclusion toBlack Skin, White Masks the possibility ofa new future. In 1961, the future is for Fanon the question of thefate of humanism, a motif he shares with, most notably,Césaire’s 1955 textDiscourse on Colonialism.What is humanism, Fanon asks, if it is held up to the measure of theworld? That is, what does humanism look like if disentangled from theEuropean concept, which is riddled with histories of violence andsubjugation, and instead reflects or is infused with the liberationstruggles of the global South? In terms of conceiving thepost-colonial nation, Fanon returns to one of his earliest motifs:measure. Post-colonial nations, created through anti-colonialviolence, cannot be duplications or imitations of European states. Inpart, this is a resolutely anti-colonial ideological position: makefor yourself, do not make for the colonizer. But it is also, if notlargely, based in a critique of Europe that understands Europe to bein crisis itself, to be dependent upon (at every level) structures ofexploitation and extraction. Europe is a “spirit built onstrange foundations” and characterized by “stasis”.(1961 [2005: 237]) Post-colonial states need different foundations,and so must work with new concepts and new imaginations ofcollectivity. Central to this are conceptions and imaginations of thehuman itself. “[W]e must make a new start”, Fanon writes,“develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a newman”. (1961 [2005: 239]) Fanon does not give this “newman” content. The new man belongs to the future. The new man isto come.

5. The Case Studies

Fanon’s training in psychiatry is a central part of his work,from the methodological approaches to and characterizations of thedynamics of anti-Black racism inBlack Skin, White Masksthrough the attention to postcolonial anxieties of cultural formationand statecraft inThe Wretched of the Earth.

But apart from method alone, Fanon’s published and unpublishedworks offer case studies of victims of colonialism, studies whichemphasize the lived pathologies of everyday life under colonial rule.Many of these are in the unpublished writings collected inÉcrits sur l’aliénation et laliberté, but a key series of case studies are included inThe Wretched of the Earth. These studies are generallyunder-thematized by Fanon scholars and postcolonial theory scholarsmore widely, though a few recent publications indicate a renewedinterest in how concrete psychiatric work might function as part ofthe postcolonial theory archive and in Fanon’s larger project.The collaborative study by Nigel Gibson and Roberto BeneduceFrantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics (2017) goes a long waytoward closing this gap in the literature, examining in detail boththe history and theoretical work underlying Fanon’s psychiatricwritings and case studies. As well, David Marriott’sWhitherFanon (2018) embeds the psychiatric writings and therapeuticpractice inside Fanon’s work on anti-blackness and postcolonialpolitics.

Fanon’s original studies consider a range of disorders resultingfrom colonial violence. Some are mental disorders, by which Fanonmeans a generalized sense of anxiety caused by colonial domination andacted out in discrete parts of the personality. Others bear thedisorder on the body and disfigure the person from the inside out orcreate sexual disorders connected to colonial degradations aroundfemininity and masculinity. As well, Fanon includes a short piece atthe end ofThe Wretched of the Earth on the medicalization ofcriminality in Algeria, with particular interest in how thosedisorders might be repurposed for the sake of revolutionary struggle.The studies are very detailed and narrativized, which opens up a newdimension of Fanon as critical observer. The studies also draw out thetension between psychiatric treatment and political ideology,something Fanon would argue is not overlaid on the situation by thetherapist, but instead discovered, in therapy, to have been installedby the colonial order. The influence of this aspect of Fanon’swork can be seen in the Black Panther Party’s work in the UnitedStates on prisoner reintegration and public health initiatives, all ofwhich were seen as blending care for the oppressed with harnessingrevolutionary potential.

6. Legacy and Influence

We could say that, in many ways, Fanon’s legacy and influenceoutsizes his modest output as a writer. Fanon wrote for about adecade, which, in any comparison with other major thinkers, is almostno time at all. The pages produced, as well, are modest.BlackSkin, White Masks andThe Wretched of the Earth aresubstantial books composed of original chapters and analysis, but theother two worksA Dying Colonialism (1959) andToward theAfrican Revolution (posthumously published in 1964) are comprisedof short essays, preliminary analyses, and occasional pieces. Whilethose shorter, preliminary, and occasional works are fascinating andimportant, they are a portrait of a thinker in motion, a thinker whosecommitment todiverse andunfolding revolutionarysites required both quick takes and patient contemplation. Fanon movedvery quickly through the Algerian struggle and did not hesitate to bedeclarative, and his work on black Africa is very much the same,albeit without the same concrete engagement and intellectualbackground. Yet, Fanon is also patient and reflective, something wesee in the psychiatric studies that simultaneously underpin hisbroader analyses and suggest other productive avenues for thought.

In other words, looking back six-plus decades later, we can seeFanon’s oeuvre as composed of profound, enduring insights and abody of un- and under-developed work. This mixed legacy in the writtenwork has not limited Fanon’s enormous influence. He was, in histime and certainly in the decades following his death, a hero to andintellectual inspiration for anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle,informing the work of thinkers from all over the global South. LatinAmerican militants drew on Fanon’s insights, as did so many onthe continent of Africa and across South Asia. His impact on culturalstudies is also sizable. Fanonian concepts inform countlessdiscussions of race, nation, migration, language, representation,visuality, and so on. This is largely due to Fanon’s uniqueability to engage across theoretical approaches and, in thoseapproaches, infuse analysis with rich phenomenological descriptions ofthe body and psyche under colonial domination. Reiland Rabaka’sForms of Fanonism (2011) is especially interesting here forits careful work to reinscribe these kinds of analysis into the Blackradical tradition more broadly.

The recent publication and translation into English of Fanon’sunpublished works, which range from letters to a draft of a play, willsurely open up new dimensions of commentary. One of the signaturefeatures of Fanon-commentary is the creativity of the interlocutorswho, if not doing lineage of influence textual study, have worked tointerpret and extend Fanon’s ideas. Indeed, this is one of themore interesting features of Fanon scholarship, something Henry LouisGates, Jr. famously described as Fanon’s function as a sort ofRorschach test—we see more in Fanon than is in the text. This isthe fecundity of Fanon’s thinking, really. Books like GlenCoulthard’sRed Skin, White Masks (2014) and HamidDabashi’sBrown Skin, White Masks (2011) rewriteFanon’s first work with an eye toward the similar-yet-differentforms of colonial experience in indigenous North America (Coulthard)and the Middle East (Dabashi). Other writers such as Homi Bhabha,Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon, Richard Pithouse, and others have extendedFanonian categories and concepts to treat the experience of exile,migration, diaspora, African-American and Caribbean experiences,contemporary post-Apartheid South African struggles for justice, andso on. This kind of work underscores the fecundity of Fanon’sideas, their elasticity and capacity for extending across historicallyand culturally diverse geographies. Such elasticity and capacitylargely derives from Fanon’s attention to the colonized as alumpen and revolutionary force, something to which he gives greatdescriptive and existential depth, rather than merely making anabstract ideological centerpiece. This attentiveness to the presenceof deep resistance amongst the masses, even in the midst of profoundand powerful forms of colonial oppression, is one of Fanon’sgreatest contributions to revolutionary theorizing of the blackAtlantic, global south, and racially marginalized populations. It iswhy Fanon’s work so exceeds page count and number of books. Tohave located and described the colonized subject under colonialdomination with such precision and texture—this is Fanon’sgift to scholars, for sure, but more than that it is his gift to allwho are engaged in radical struggle against racialized oppression.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Capécia, Mayotte, 1948,Je suis Martiniquaise,Paris: Corrêa. Translated asI Am a Martinican Woman inI Am a Martinican Woman/The White Negress: TwoNovelettes, Beatrice Stith Clark (trans.), Pueblo, CO:Passeggiata Press, 1997.
• Césaire, Aimé, 1955 [1972],Discours sur lecolonialisme, Pris/Dakar: Présence Africaine. TranslatedasDiscourse on Colonialism, Joan Pinkham (trans.), New York:MR.
• Frantz Fanon, 1952 [2008],Peau noire, masques blancs,Seuil. Translated asBlack Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox(trans), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1959 [1994],L’an V de laRévolution algérienne, Maspero. Translated asADying Colonialism, Haakon Chevalier (trans.), New York: GroveBooks, 1994. Includes the essays
  • “Algeria Unveiled”
  • “The Algerian Family”
  • “Algeria’s European Minority”
• –––, 1961 [2005],Les damnés de laterre, Maspero. Translated asThe Wretched of the Earth,Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
• –––, 1964 [1994],Pour la révolutionafricaine. Écrits politiques, Maspero. Translated asToward the African Revolution, Haakon Chevalier (trans), NewYork: Grove Books, 1994. Includes the essays
  • 1955, “West Indians and Africans”.
  • 1956, “Racism and Culture”.
  • 1960, “Unity and Effective Solidarity are the Conditions forAfrican Liberation”.
  • 1961, “Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise”.
• –––, 2006,The Fanon Reader, AzzedineHaddour (ed.), London: Pluto Press.
• –––, 2014,Decolonizing Madness: ThePsychiatric Writings of Frantz Fanon, Nigel Gibson (ed.), London:Palgrave.
• –––, 2015 [2018],Écrits surl’aliénation et la liberté, Jean Khalfa andRobert J.C. Young (eds), Paris: La Découverte. Translated asAlienation and Freedom, Steven Corcoran (trans.), London:Bloomsbury, 2018.
• Guex, Germaine, 1950,La Névrose d’abandon,Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1946,Réflexions sur la questionjuive, Paris: Editions Morihien. Translated asAnti-Semiteand Jew, George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken,1948.

Selected Secondary Sources

• Alessandrini, Anthony C. (ed.), 2005,Frantz Fanon: CriticalPerspectives, New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203979501
• –––, 2014,Frantz Fanon and the Future ofCultural Politics, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Batchelor, Kathryn and Sue-Ann Harding (eds), 2017,Translating Fanon Across Continents and Languages, New York:Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315620626
• Bhabha, Homi, 1994,The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203979501
• Ciccariello-Maher, George, 2017,Decolonizing Dialectics,(Radical Américas), Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Coulthard, Glen Sean, 2014,Red Skin, White Masks: Rejectingthe Colonial Politics of Recognition, (Indigenous Americas),Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Dabashi, Hamid, 2011,Brown Skin, White Masks, London:Pluto.
• Farred, Grant (ed.), 2013,Fanon: Imperative of the Now,special issue ofSouth Atlantic Quarterly 112(1/Winter).
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, 1991, “Critical Fanonism”,Critical Inquiry, 17(3):457–470. doi:10.1086/448592
• Gibson, Nigel, 2011,Fanonian Practices in South Africa,London: Palgrave.
• –––, 2017,Fanon: The PostcolonialImagination, London: Polity Press.
• Gibson, Nigel and Roberto Beneduce, 2017,Frantz Fanon,Psychiatry and Politics, Lanham, MD: Rowman and LittlefieldPublishers.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995,Fanon and the Crisis of European Man:An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, New York:Routledge.
• –––, 2015,What Fanon Said: A PhilosophicalIntroduction to His Life and Thought, New York: FordhamUniversity Press.
• Gordon, Lewis, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White(eds), 1996,Fanon: A Critical Reader, Hoboken:Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
• Lee, Christopher J., 2015,Frantz Fanon: Toward aRevolutionary Humanism, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
• Marriott, David, 2018,Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blacknessof Being, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Mbembe, Achille, 2013 [2017],Critique de la RaisonNègre, Paris: Editions La Découverte. Translated asCritique of Black Reason, Laurent Dubois (trans.), Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• –––, 2016,Politiques del’inimitié, Paris: La Découverte.
• Nayar, Pramod, 2013,Frantz Fanon, New York: Routledge.doi:10.4324/9780203073186
• Rabaka, Reiland, 2015,The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois,Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Lanham,MD: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2014,Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabraland Africana Critical Theory, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2011,Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’sCritical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization, Lanham, MD:Lexington Books.
• –––, 2009,Africana Critical Theory:Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois andC.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Lanham, MD:Lexington Books.
• Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 1997,Fanon’s Dialectic ofExperience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Academic Tools

	How to cite this entry.
	Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
	Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
	Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

• Fondation Frantz Fanon (in French, but with English language option).

Related Entries

Africana Philosophy | Afro-Caribbean Philosophy |colonialism |existentialism |Négritude |race | race: and Black identity