| Frantz Fanon | |
| Birth Place: | Fort-de-France, Martinique |
| Death Place: | Bethesda, Maryland |
| Alma Mater: | University of Lyon |
| Notable Works: | Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth |
| Region: | Africana philosophy |
| School Tradition: | Marxism Black existentialism Critical theory Existential phenomenology |
| Main Interests: | Decolonization and Postcolonialism, revolution, psychopathology of colonization, racism, Psychoanalysis |
| Spouse: | Josie Fanon |
| Influences: | Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky[1] Mao Zedong Ho Chi Minh Négritude Sigmund Freud Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir Aimé Césaire Maurice Merleau-Ponty G.W.F. Hegel Jacques Lacan |
| Influenced: | Afro-pessimism Hortense Spillers Edward Said Ngugi wa Thiong'o Ali Shariati Steve Biko Malcolm X Che Guevara Paulo Freire Huey P. Newton Bobby Seale Lewis Gordon Raya Dunayevskaya Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari |
| Notable Ideas: | Double consciousness, colonial alienation, To become black, Sociogeny |
Frantz Omar Fanon ([2]
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".
In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time".[11] For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.[12] [13] [14] He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would have an improved prognosis if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.[15]
Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, which was then part of the French colonial empire. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, worked as a customs officer, while Fanon's mother, Eléanore Médélice, who was of Afro-Caribbean and French descent, was a shopkeeper.[16] Fanon was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. Two of his siblings died young, including Fanon's sister Gabrielle, with whom he was very close. As they were middle class, his family could afford to sent Fanon to the Lycée Victor Schœlcher, the most prestigious secondary school in Martinique, where Fanon came to admire one of his teachers, Aimé Césaire.[17]
After the Battle of France resulted in the French Third Republic capitulating to Nazi Germany in July 1940, Martinique came under the control of French Navy elements led by Admiral Georges Robert who were loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime. The disruption of imports from Metropolitan France led to major shortages on the island, which were exacerbated by a naval blockade imposed by the United States on Martinique in April 1943. Robert's authoritarian regime repressed local Allied sympathizers, hundreds of whom escaped to nearby Caribbean islands. Fanon later described the Vichy regime in Martinique as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".[18] In January 1943, he fled Martinique during the wedding of one of his brothers and travelled to the British colony of Dominica in order to link up with other Allied sympathizers.[19]
After he arrived at Dominica, Robert's regime was deposed by an indigenous uprising in June 1943, which Fanon would later acclaim as "the birth of the [Martinican] proletariat" as a revolutionary force. After the uprising, Charles de Gaulle appointed Henri Tourtet as the governor of Martinique, who raised the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion to serve in Free French Forces (FFL). Fanon "enthusiastically" returned to Martinique and joined the unit in Fort-de-France.[20] [21] He underwent basic training before boarding a troopship bound for Casablanca, Morocco in March 1944. After Fanon arrived in Morocco, he was shocked to discover the extent of racial discrimination in the FFL. He was subsequently transferred to a Free French military base in Béjaïa, Algeria, where Fanon witnessed firsthand the antisemitism and Islamophobia of the pieds-noirs, many of whom had supported racist laws promulgated by the Vichy regime.[22]
In August 1944, he departed on another troopship from Oran to France as part of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of German-occupied Provence. After the US VI Corps secured a beachhead, Fanon's unit came ashore at Saint-Tropez and advanced inland. He participated in several engagements near Montbéliard, Doubs and was seriously wounded by shrapnel, which resulted in him being hospitalized for two months. Fanon was awarded a Croix de Guerre by Colonel Raoul Salan for his actions during the engagements, and in early 1945 rejoined his unit and fought in the Battle of Alsace.[23] After German forces had been pushed out of France and Allied troops crossed the Rhine into Germany, Fanon and his fellow Black troops were removed from their formations and sent southwards to Toulon as part of de Gaulle's policy of removing non-white soldiers from the French army. He was subsequently transferred to Normandy to await repatriation.[24]
Although Fanon had been initially eager to participate in the Allied war effort, the racism he witnessed during the war disillusioned him. Fanon wrote to his brother Joby from Europe that "I've been decieved, and I am paying for my mistakes... I'm sick of it all." In the fall of 1945, a newly-discharged Fanon returned to Martinique, where he focused on completing his secondary education. He also worked for the political campaign of Césaire, by now a friend and mentor of his. Césaire ran on the French Communist Party ticket as a delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the French Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed in Martininque long enough to complete his baccalauréat and then went to Metropolitan France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry.
Fanon 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, of which two survive.[25] After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole under the radical Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the role of culture in psychopathology.
In 1948 Fanon started a relationship with Michèle Weyer, a medical student, who soon became pregnant. He left her for an 18-year-old high school student, Josie, whom he married in 1952. At urging of his friends he later recognized his daughter, Mireille, although he did not have contact with her.[26]
In France while completing his residency, Fanon wrote and published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people. Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon, entitled "Essay on the Disalienation of the Black", which was a response to the racism that Fanon experienced while studying psychiatry and medicine at university in Lyon; the rejection of the dissertation prompted Fanon to publish it as a book. For his doctor of philosophy degree, he submitted another dissertation of narrower scope and different subject. Left-wing philosopher Francis Jeanson, leader of the pro-Algerian independence Jeanson network, read Fanon's manuscript and as a senior book editor at Éditions du Seuil in Paris, gave the book its new title and wrote its epilogue.[27]
After receiving Fanon's manuscript at Seuil, Jeanson invited him to an editorial meeting. Amid Jeanson's praise of the book, Fanon exclaimed: "Not bad for a nigger, is it?" Insulted, Jeanson dismissed Fanon from his office. Later, Jeanson learned that his response had earned him the writer's lifelong respect, and Fanon acceded to Jeanson's suggestion that the book be entitled Black Skin, White Masks.
In the book, Fanon described the unfair treatment of black people in France and how they were disapproved of by white people. Black people also had a sense of inferiority when facing white people. Fanon believed that even though they could speak French, they could not fully integrate into the life and environment of white people. (See further discussion of Black Skin, White Masks under Work, below.)
After his residency, Fanon practised psychiatry at Pontorson, near Mont Saint-Michel, for another year and then (from 1953) in Algeria. He was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. He worked there until his deportation in January 1957.[28]
Fanon's methods of treatment started evolving, particularly by beginning socio-therapy to connect with his patients' cultural backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, after having made contact with Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French soldiers and officers who carried out torture in order to suppress anti-colonial resistance. Additionally, Fanon was also responsible for treating Algerian torture victims.
Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabylia 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 Fanon realized that he could no longer continue to support French efforts, even indirectly via his hospital work. In November he submitted his "Letter of resignation to the Resident Minister", which later became an influential text of its own in anti-colonialist circles.[29]
There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.
Shortly afterwards, Fanon was expelled from Algeria and moved to Tunis where he joined the FLN openly. He was part of the editorial collective of Al Moudjahid, for which he wrote until the end of his life. He also served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government (GPRA). He 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 war tactical strategies; in one chapter he discusses how to open a southern front to the war and how to run the supply lines.
Upon 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 remission of his illness. When he came back to Tunis once again, he dictated his testament The Wretched of the Earth. When he was not confined to his bed, he delivered lectures to Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) officers at Ghardimao on the Algerian–Tunisian border. He traveled to Rome for a three-day meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre who had greatly influenced his work. Sartre agreed to write a preface to Fanon's last book, The Wretched of the Earth.[30]
With his health declining, Fanon's comrades urged him to seek treatment in the U.S. as his Soviet doctors had suggested.[31] In 1961, the CIA arranged a trip under the promise of stealth for further leukemia treatment at a National Institutes of Health facility.[32] During his time in the United States, Fanon was handled by CIA agent Oliver Iselin.[33] As Lewis R. Gordon points out, the circumstances of Fanon's stay are somewhat disputed: "What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia."
Fanon subsequently died from double pneumonia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961 after finally having begun his leukemia treatment, although far too late.[34] He had been admitted under the name of Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.[35] He was buried in Algeria after lying in state in Tunisia. Later, his body was moved to a martyrs' (Chouhada) graveyard at Aïn Kerma in eastern Algeria.Frantz Fanon was survived by his French wife, Josie (née Dublé), their son, Olivier Fanon, and his daughter from a previous relationship, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France. Josie Fanon later became disillusioned with the government and after years of depression and drinking died by suicide in Algiers in 1989.[36] Mireille became a professor of international law and conflict resolution and serves as president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Olivier became president of the Frantz Fanon National Association, which was created in Algiers in 2012.[37]
Black Skin, White Masks was first published in French as Peau noire, masques blancs in 1952 and is one of Fanon's most important works. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that they live in, and studies how they navigate the world through a performance of Whiteness. Particularly in discussing language, he talks about how the black person's use of a colonizer's language is seen by the colonizer as predatory, and not transformative, which in turn may create insecurity in the black's consciousness. He recounts that he himself faced many admonitions as a child for using Creole French instead of "real French", or "French French", that is, "white" French. Ultimately, he concludes that "mastery of language [of the white/colonizer] for the sake of recognition as white reflects a dependency that subordinates the black's humanity".
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, it has been argued Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence (it would be more accurate to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence) and that his ideas have been extremely oversimplified. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work ignores the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. For example, the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks translates, literally, as "The Lived Experience of the Black" ("L'expérience vécue du Noir"), but Markmann's translation is "The Fact of Blackness", which leaves out the massive influence of phenomenology on Fanon's early work.[38]
Although Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks while still in France, most of his work was written in North Africa. It was during this time that he produced works such as L'An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne in 1959 (Year Five of the Algerian Revolution), later republished as Sociology of a Revolution and later still as A Dying Colonialism. Fanon's original title was "Reality of a Nation"; however the publisher, François Maspero, refused to accept this title.
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.
A Dying Colonialism is a 1959 book by Fanon that provides an account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria fought their oppressors. They changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy the oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression. The militant book describes Fanon's understanding that for the colonized, “having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death.”[39] It also contains one of his most influential articles, "Unveiled Algeria", that signifies the fall of imperialism and describes how oppressed people struggle to decolonize their "mind" to avoid assimilation.
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961, Les damnés de la terre), published shortly before Fanon's death, Fanon defends the right of a colonized people to use violence to gain independence. In addition, he delineated the processes and forces leading to national independence or neocolonialism during the decolonization movement that engulfed much of the world after World War II. In defence of the use of violence by colonized peoples, Fanon argued that human beings who are not considered as such (by the colonizer) shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity in their attitude towards the colonizer. His book was censored by the French government.
For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only "language" the colonizer speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon the colonized. 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.[40]
His participation in the Algerian 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.[41]
An often overlooked aspect of Fanon's work is that he did not like to physically write his pieces. Instead, he would dictate to his wife, Josie, who did all of the writing and, in some cases, contributed and edited.[42]
Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Négritude, and Marxism.
Aimé Césaire was a particularly significant influence in Fanon's life. Césaire, a leader of the Négritude movement, was teacher and mentor to Fanon on the island of Martinique.[43] Fanon was first introduced to Négritude during his lycée days in Martinique when Césaire coined the term and presented his ideas in Tropiques, the journal that he edited with Suzanne Césaire, his wife, in addition to his now classic Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming).[44] Fanon referred to Césaire's writings in his own work. He quoted, for example, his teacher at length in "The Lived Experience of the Black Man", a heavily anthologized essay from Black Skins, White Masks.[45]
Fanon has had an influence on anti-colonial and national 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;[46] for Shariati and Biko the main interest in Fanon was "the new man" and "black consciousness" respectively.[47]
With regard to the American liberation struggle more commonly known as The Black Power Movement, Fanon's work was especially influential. His book Wretched of the Earth is quoted directly in the preface of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton's book, [48] which was published in 1967, shortly after Carmichael left the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In addition, Carmichael and Hamilton include much of Fanon's theory on Colonialism in their work, beginning by framing the situation of former slaves in America as a colony situated inside a nation. "To put it another way, there is no "American dilemma" because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them" (Ture Hamilton, 5). Another example is the indictment of the black middle class or what Fanon called the "colonized intellectual" as the indoctrinated followers of the colonial power. Fanon states, "The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world" (47).[49] A third example is the idea that the natives (African Americans) should be constructing new social systems rather than participating in the systems created by the settler population. Ture and Hamilton contend that "black people should create rather than imitate" (144).The Black Power group that Fanon had the most influence on was the Black Panther Party (BPP). In 1970 Bobby Seale, the Chairman of the BPP, published a collection of recorded observations made while he was incarcerated entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton.[50] This book, while not an academic text, is a primary source chronicling the history of the BPP through the eyes of one of its founders. While describing one of his first meetings with Huey P. Newton, Seale describes bringing him a copy of Wretched of the Earth. There are at least three other direct references to the book, all of them mentioning ways in which the book was influential and how it was included in the curriculum required of all new BPP members. Beyond just reading the text, Seale and the BPP included much of the work in their party platform. The Panther 10 Point Plan contained 6 points which either directly or indirectly referenced ideas in Fanon's work including their contention that there must be an end to the "robbery by the white man", and "education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society" (67). One of the most important elements adopted by the BPP was the need to build the "humanity" of the native. Fanon claimed that the realization by the native that s/he was human would mark the beginning of the push for freedom (33). The BPP embraced this idea through the work of their Community Schools and Free Breakfast Programs.
Bolivian indianist Fausto Reinaga also had some Fanon influence and he mentions The Wretched of the Earth in his magnum opus La Revolución India, advocating for decolonisation of native South Americans from European influence. In 2015 Raúl Zibechi argued that Fanon had become a key figure for the Latin American left.[51] In August 2021 Fanon's book Voices of liberation was one of those brought by Elisa Loncón to the new "plurinational library" of the Constitutional Convention of Chile.[52]
Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others. His work was a key influence on the Black Panther Party, particularly his ideas concerning nationalism, violence and the lumpenproletariat. More recently, radical South African poor people's movements, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (meaning 'people who live in shacks' in Zulu), have been influenced by Fanon's work.[53] His work was a key influence on Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, as well.
Fanon has also profoundly affected contemporary African literature. His work serves as an important theoretical gloss for writers including Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Senegal's Ken Bugul and Ousmane Sembène, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Ngũgĩ goes so far to argue in Decolonizing the Mind (1992) that it is "impossible to understand what informs African writing" without reading Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.[54]
The Caribbean Philosophical Association offers the Frantz Fanon Prize for work that furthers the decolonization and liberation of mankind.[55]
Fanon's writings on black sexuality in Black Skin, White Masks have garnered critical attention by a number of academics and queer theory scholars. Interrogating Fanon's perspective on the nature of black homosexuality and masculinity, queer theory academics have offered a variety of critical responses to Fanon's words, balancing his position within postcolonial studies with his influence on the formation of contemporary black queer theory.[56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61]
Fanon's legacy has expanded even further into Black Studies and more specifically, into the theories of Afro-pessimism and Black Critical Theory. Thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson have taken up Fanon's ontological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic analyses of the Negro and the "zone of non-being" in order to develop theories of anti-Blackness. Putting Fanon in conversation with prominent thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers, and focusing primarily on the Charles Lam Markmann translation of Black Skin, White Masks, Black Critical Theorists and Afropessimists take seriously the ontological implications of the "Fact of Blackness" and "The Negro and Psychopathology", formulating the Black or the Slave as the non-relational, phobic object that constitutes civil society.[62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68]
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