Frantz Fanon

Political Thought (UNIT 2)

• Frantz Fanon was a prominent thinker supporting the decolonization struggles post-World War II and remains one of the most influential voices in the field.

• His life was marked by active engagement in the Algerian independence struggle against France and his insightful analyses of the human impulse for freedom within the colonial context.

• Fanon’s works have become central in Africana thought, particularly for their focus on hybridity and creolization in forming humanist, anti-colonial cultures.

• Hybridity is seen as a counter-hegemonic force against colonialism, offering a non-assimilationist approach to building connections across cultures.

• Paget Henry, an Africana scholar, argues that hybridity is foundational to Africana political philosophy.

• Tracing the development of Fanon’s writings reveals why he has become an inspirational figure for those working for social justice for marginalized and oppressed groups.

• Fanon’s first work, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), was a radical anti-racist humanism that did not align with assimilation to white-supremacist cultures or reactionary philosophies of black superiority.

• In his first book, the focus was on the oppression of colonized peoples, approached from the position of a relatively privileged Martinican citizen in France, seeking his place in the world as a black man from the French Caribbean.

• Later works, such as L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), expanded beyond European cultural imperialism to focus on the struggles and consciousness of the colonized natives as they reclaimed their lands and human dignity.

• Fanon’s enduring legacy is his expansive conception of humanity, emphasizing the individual human dignity of each person in populations typically dismissed as “the masses”.

• His moral core of decolonization theory centers on the commitment to individual dignity, setting him apart as a key figure in post-colonial thought.

Biography

• Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in the French colony of Martinique.

• His family was part of the black bourgeoisie in Martinique, with his father, Casimir Fanon, serving as a customs inspector, and his mother, Eléanore Médélice, owning a hardware store in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique.

• Members of this social class typically aimed for assimilation into white French culture, which shaped Fanon’s early environment.

• Fanon learned France’s history as his own until his high school years when he encountered the philosophy of negritude, taught by Aimé Césaire, a renowned critic of European colonization.

• Politicized and torn between assimilationism and the racial identity focus of negritude, Fanon left Martinique in 1943 at the age of 18 to fight with the Free French forces during World War II.

• After the war, Fanon stayed in France to study psychiatry and medicine at the University of Lyons.

• In France, Fanon faced anti-black racism, which was starkly different from the complex class distinctions in the Caribbean, inspiring him to write “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks,” which eventually became his first book, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952).

• In Peau Noire, Fanon broke from the assimilation-negritude dichotomy, exploring Marxist and existentialist ideas to form his anti-racist humanism.

• After finishing his studies, Fanon briefly returned to the Caribbean but no longer felt at home and in 1953, after a stint in Paris, accepted a position as chef de service (chief of staff) at the psychiatric ward of the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria.

• In 1954, Algeria erupted in the war of independence against France, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and brutally suppressed by the French forces.

• Working in a French hospital, Fanon treated the psychological distress of French soldiers involved in torture and the trauma of Algerian torture victims.

• By 1956, Fanon, alienated by the effects of French imperialism, resigned from his position and began supporting the Algerian independence movement.

• Fanon worked primarily in Tunisia, where he trained nurses for the FLN, edited its newspaper el Moujahid, and contributed to Presence Africaine and Les Temps Modernes.

• His writings from this period were published posthumously as Pour la Révolution Africaine (Toward the African Revolution) in 1964.

• In 1959, Fanon published L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (The Year of the Algerian Revolution), detailing the organization of oppressed Algerian natives into a revolutionary force.

• That same year, he became the ambassador to Ghana for the provisional Algerian government, using this diplomatic post to open supply routes for the Algerian army.

• In Ghana, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia, which led to his death.

• Despite his failing health, Fanon spent the last ten months of his life writing his most famous book, Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), which critiques the violence of colonialism and calls for a new history of humanity initiated by a decolonized Third World.

• In October 1961, Fanon was brought to the United States for medical treatment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, by a C.I.A. agent.

• Fanon died on December 6, 1961, still focused on the cause of liberty and justice for Third World peoples.

• At the request of the FLN, his body was returned to Tunisia and later transported to Algeria, where he was buried in the soil of the nation for which he fought.