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Fanon page
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two
potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought,
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial
studies.
 Fanon was born
in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He
left Martinique in 1943, when he volunteered to fight with the Free French
in World War II, and he remained in France after the war to study medicine
and psychiatry on scholarship in Lyon. Here he began writing political
essays and plays, and he married a Frenchwoman, Jose Duble. Before he left
France, Fanon had already published his first analysis of the effects of
racism and colonization, Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM),
originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks," in part based
on his lectures and experiences in Lyon.
BSWM is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon's
personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates
the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as
psychology. Because of his schooling and cultural background, the young
Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorientation he felt after
his initial encounter with French racism decisively shaped his psychological
theories about culture. Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice
with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs
that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white
norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological
health in the black man.
For Fanon, being colonized by a language has
larger implications for one's consciousness: "To speak . . . means above
all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17-18).
Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the
collective consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with
evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with
evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal
subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly
abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized,
or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture
between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions,
the black man is necessarily alienated from himself.
Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability
on its negation, "black." Neither exists without the other, and both come
into being at the moment of imperial conquest. Thus, Fanon locates the
historical point at which certain psychological formations became possible,
and he provides an important analysis of how historically-bound cultural
systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward Said describes, can perpetuate
themselves as psychology. While Fanon charts the psychological oppression
of black men, his book should not be taken as an accurate portrait of the
oppression of black women under similar conditions. The work of feminists
in postcolonial studies undercuts Fanon's simplistic and unsympathetic
portrait of the black woman's complicity in colonization.
 In
1953, Fanon became Head of the Psychiatry Department at the Blida-Joinville
Hospital in Algeria, where he instituted reform in patient care and desegregated
the wards. During his tenure in Blida, the war for Algerian independence
broke out, and Fanon was horrified by the stories of torture his patients
-- both French torturers and Algerian torture victims -- told him. The
Algerian War consolidated Fanon's alienation from the French imperial viewpoint,
and in 1956 he formally resigned his post with the French government to
work for the Algerian cause. His letter of resignation encapsulates his
theory of the psychology of colonial domination, and pronounces the colonial
mission incompatible with ethical psychiatric practice: "If psychiatry
is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger
to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently
an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.
. . . The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive
attempt to decerebralize a people" (Toward the African Revolution
53).
Following his resignation, Fanon fled to Tunisia and began working openly
with the Algerian independence movement. In addition to seeing patients,
Fanon wrote about the movement for a number of publications, including
Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, Presence Africaine, and the
FLN newspaper el Moudjahid; some of his work from this period was
collected posthumously as Toward the African Revolution (1964).
But Fanon's work for Algerian independence was not confined to writing.
During his tenure as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government,
he worked to establish a southern supply route for the Algerian army.
While in Ghana, Fanon developed leukemia, and though encouraged by friends
to rest, he refused. He completed his final and most fiery indictment of
the colonial condition, The Wretched of the Earth, in 10 months,
and the book was published by Jean-Paul Sartre in the year of his death.
Fanon died at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland,
where he had sought treatment for his cancer, on December 6, 1961. At his
request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with honors by the
Algerian National Army of Liberation.
 In The
Wretched of the Earth, Fanon develops the Manichean perspective implicit
in BSWM. To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and
white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being.
This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total
revolution, "absolute violence" (37). Violence purifies, destroying not
only the category of white, but that of black too. According to Fanon,
true revolution in Africa can only come from the peasants, or "fellaheen."
Putting peasants at the vanguard of the revolution reveals the influence
of the FLN, who based their operations in the countryside, on Fanon's thinking.
Furthermore, this emphasis on the rural underclass highlights Fanon's disgust
with the greed and politicking of the comprador bourgeoisie in new African
nations. The brand of nationalism espoused by these classes, and even by
the urban proletariat, is insufficient for total revolution because such
classes benefit from the economic structures of imperialism. Fanon claims
that non-agrarian revolutions end when urban classes consolidate their
own power, without remaking the entire system. In his faith in the African
peasantry as well as his emphasis on language, Fanon anticipates the work
of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o,
who finds revolutionary artistic power among the peasants.
Given Fanon's importance to postcolonial studies, the obituaries marking
his death were small; the two inches of type offered by The New York
Times and Le Monde inadequately describe his achievements and
role. He has been influential in both leftist and anti-racist political
movements, and all of his works were translated into English in the decade
following his death. His work stands as an important influence on current
postcolonial theorists, notably Homi Bhabha and Edward Said.
British director Isaac Julien's Frantz
Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996) has recently been released
by California Newsreel. Weaving together interviews with family members
and friends, documentary footage, readings from Fanon's work, and dramatizations
of crucial moments in his life, the film reveals not just the facts of
Fanon's brief and remarkably eventful life but his long and tortuous journey
as well. In the course of the film, critics Stuart Hall and Françoise
Verges position Fanon's work in his own time and draw out its implications
for our own.
Works by Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967. Reprint of Peau
noire, masques blancs. Paris, 1952.
Studies in a Dying Colonialism, or A Dying Colonialism. New York,
1965. Reprint of L'an cinq de la revolution algerienne. Paris, 1959.
The Wretched of the Earth. New York, 1965. Reprint of Les
damnes de la terre. Paris, 1961.
Toward the African Revolution. New York, 1967. Reprint of Pour
la revolution africaine. Paris, 1964.
Selected Criticism
Abel, Lionel. "Seven Heroes of the New Left." The New York Times
Magazine 5 may 1968.
Bhabha, Homi. "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial
Prerogative." The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
40-66.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. New York: Putnam,
1964.
Bergner, Gwen. "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in
Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." PMLA 110.1 (January 1995):
75-88.
Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.
Fuss, Diana. "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification."
Diacritics (Summer-Fall 1994): 20-42.
Gates, Henry Louis. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17
(1992): 457-470.
Geismar, Peter. Fanon. New York: The Dial Press, 1971.
Gendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York:
Pantheon Books-Random House, 1973.
Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
"Homage to Frantz Fanon." Presence Africaine 12 (1962): 130-152.
Ten writers, politicians and scholars contributed to this special section,
including Aime Césaire and Nkrumah.
Memmi, Albert. "The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon." Massachusetts
Review (Winter 1973): 9-39.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books-Random
House, 1993.
Seigel, J. E. "On Frantz Fanon." American Scholar (Winter 1968):
84-96.
"Remembering Fanon." New Formations 1 (Spring 1987): 118-135.
Homi Bhabha, Stephan Feuchtwang and Barbara Harlow contributed to a special
section remembering Fanon on the 25th anniversary of his death.
Links to Other Sites
Isaac Julien's
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
An
Introduction to Fanon
Fanon
and "National Culture"
Fanon
on the national bourgeoisie and "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness"
Black
Skin White Masks--Orality as both Domination and Resistance
Author: Author: Jennifer
Poulos, Spring 1996
Links within this site
Postcolonial Studies at Emory
 Introduction Authors Theorists Terms
& Issues
(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's
Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of
Cultural History, 1995].)
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