Revolutionary Thinker Franz Fanon at 100

19th July 20251 Commenton Revolutionary Thinker Franz Fanon at 100

“In an era of new global brutality, his reflections against colonialism and racism, and in defence of the universal, remain intellectually vital in a world ravaged by imperialist logics.”

By Hélène Bidard, Party of the European Left

The Party of the European Left pays tribute to Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary thinker, and freedom fighter. The theorist of human liberation was born one hundred years ago, on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France. He embraced the cause of Algerian independence and global emancipation. In an era of new global brutality, his reflections against colonialism and racism, and in defence of the universal, remain intellectually vital in a world ravaged by imperialist logics.

Across the vast expanse of a transatlantic geography, his journey was a “call to live,” as Aimé Césaire said of him. At the twilight of colonisation, Fanon’s thought—rooted in struggle—grasped a historical rupture. It remains a call to fight for the creation of a world free from domination, liberated from colonialism, and rid of the discourses and acts meant to reify human beings.

An anti-Nazi fighter at 18, then a medical student in Lyon, Fanon became a psychiatrist in Blida, Algeria. There, he practiced a form of clinical work inspired by institutional psychiatry. For him, colonization generates mental disorders in both the colonized and the colonizers. It alienates bodies and corrodes minds. His work charts lines of escape from that “zone of non-being” to which the colonized are consigned; these routes pass through a resolute will to be human—only human. This desire to rise into humanity underpins both his political project and his clinical practice. How can one not still feel the grip of this today, when in Gaza, war criminals call Palestinians “human animals” to justify genocidal machinery?

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon rejects all fixed identities: “The Negro is not. No more than the White.” He denounces the racial categories imposed by colonialism to divide humanity and defends a decolonial, radical, embodied humanism: “I am a man, and it is the whole past of the world that I must reclaim.”

In Algeria Unveiled, he shows how the colonial regime manipulates women’s bodies to fracture colonized society under the guise of emancipation. But unveiling can also become a revolutionary tactic. To those who dream of a return to religion, he replies: “My path stands in opposition to yours.” Emancipation cannot be nostalgia; it is invention.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon opposes a strictly economistic reading of oppression. He writes: “In the colonies, the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. Cause and consequence are one: one is rich because one is white, and one is white because one is rich.” Rejecting dogmatic frameworks, he weaves together Marxism, existentialism, and lived experience to think through liberation.

He had already denounced what we now call a permanent state of war: military domination, terror, censorship, exile, sanctions, and all the brutalities of the world.

Fanon said it clearly: “No peace without liberation.”

Frantz Fanon died at 36, but his humanist and combative body of work endures. It compels us. It continues to call us—to the decolonisation of thought and structures, to self-reflection and reflection on the world, and to the struggle.

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• Hélène Bidard is a member of the European Left’s Executive Board and Deputy Mayor of Paris for Gender Equality, Youth and Popular Education- you can follow her on Twitter/X and Instagram.
• You can follow the Party of the European Left on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
• This article was originally published by the European Left on 16th July 2025.

Monoskop.orgmonoskop.org/images/a/a5/Fanon_Frantz_Black_Skin_White_Masks_1986.pdf

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS - Monoskop

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The Wretched of the Earth

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Libcom.orgfiles.libcom.org/files/nigel-c-gibson-frantz-fanon-psychiatry-and-politics.pdf

Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics - Libcom.org

his major works and many are viewed as peripheral to Fanon's three books and the collection of his political writings that has been available to English.

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Alienation and Freedom | Baixa Cultura

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Page 6. Plates ix. Illustrations xi. Frantz Fanon: Works ...

Libcom.orgfiles.libcom.org/files/A Dying Colonialism - Frantz Fanon.pdf

A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon - Libcom.org

In this way, and not through books, business deals, or international assemblies is the present unity of humanity being forged and constructed. Frantz Fanon ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/details/frantzfanoncolon0000zaha

colonialism and alienation : concerning Frantz Fanon's political theory

Jun 4, 2019 ... Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961, Colonies. Publisher: New York : Monthly Review Press. Collection: trent_university; internetarchivebooks; inlibrary ...

FRANTZ FANON’S INSIGHTFUL ANALYSIS: 5 TRANSFORMATIVE LESSONS FROM ‘THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH’

IKRAAM SHARIF (AUTHOR), CHARLIE SØRENSEN (EDITOR)
November 22, 2023

Frantz Fanon examines the effects of colonialism in his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (TWOFE) by reviewing the decolonisation process and global advancements in freedom. This book also emphasises how colonialism reduced the human dignity of those violently colonised and the clear need for a robust response to remove colonialism as well as its overall effect on the psyche of the people.

Frantz Fanon was a well-known author and scholar. He was born in 1925 and raised in Martinique’s French territory. Thus, his firsthand experiences with racism, colonialism, and the regal control of global powers directly influenced his commitment to the topic.

This book review discusses the varied concepts of colonialism, violence and psychology and the book’s relevance to society to summarise the book’s impact.


“In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved.”J.P Sartre & F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
The Dynamics of Violence and Decolonisation in Fanon’s Perspective

In the first chapter, ‘Concerning Violence’, we are introduced to the first concept – violence. Frantz Fanon emphasises how decolonisation is inherently violent. Colonialism is fierce from the start and never stops being violent. He notes that “their [the colonies] first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together […] was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and canon” (Fanon, 1963, p.36). Violence is the only way for it to end.

He emphasises the value of self-respect and self-discovery, one of his defences against violence. This focus deserves praise since it is global and addresses all colonised people. According to Frantz Fanon, excessive violence enables the colonised to realise that he is not who the coloniser has made him believe he is via belittling, vilifying, and punishing him.

To “[drive] into the locals’ heads the concept that if the settlers were to depart, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality,” the coloniser not only “distorts, disfigures, and destroys” pre-colonial history but also psychologically degrades the native (Fanon, 1963, p.210). Here, Fanon creates a striking portrait of the colonised people’s lack of regard for themselves before the liberation that violence grants them. He emphasises that the colonised should not look up to or idolise the settlers.
Fanon’s Exploration of Colonialism’s Psychological Impact

The native is free from “his inferiority complex and his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect,” according to Fanon, who describes violence as a “cleaning force” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 94). Once more, Frantz Fanon uses emotive language that tremendously appeals to colonised readers. To portray something as unpleasant and destructive as violence in a good light is an intriguing idea.

A revolution’s use of violence can bring people together and spark a national movement where they can vent the repressed wrath caused by colonialism. Sonnleitner notes in ‘Of Logic and Liberation: Frantz Fanon on Terrorism’ that it is “personally therapeutic” (Sonnleitner, 1987, p.291). Using the adjective “therapeutic” to describe something violent and oppressive, such as colonialism, can arguably be disrespectful to the colonised.

However, whether you agree with Fanon’s moral argument when colonised people have been denied a means of expressing their sentiments for so long, his claim that violence fosters self-respect can be valid.

Fanon claims violence must be acknowledged. As we have seen, he contends that using violence brings about self-respect, self-discovery, and independence. Yet, he goes on to devote chapter five, ‘Colonial World and Mental Disorders’, to the mental illnesses and disorders that are direct results of violence in colonial times.

As readers, we are simultaneously being considered to understand that Fanon is arguing the justification of violence to gain self-respect and how it can damage the psyche of the native people – so which one is it? Does violence damage the mind of the colonised, or does it leave the colonised the ability to fight for freedom and against oppression?
Reconciling Violence with Mental Health in Colonial Contexts

Fanon claims violence must be acknowledged. As we have seen, he contends that using violence brings about self-respect, self-discovery, and independence. Yet, he goes on to devote chapter five, ‘Colonial World and Mental Disorders’, to the mental illnesses and disorders that are direct results of violence in colonial times.

As readers, we are simultaneously being considered to understand that Fanon is arguing the justification of violence to gain self-respect and how it can damage the psyche of the native people – so which one is it? Does violence damage the mind of the colonised, or does it leave the colonised the ability to fight for freedom and against oppression?
Frantz Fanon’s Legacy and the Continued Relevance of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’

Fanon maintains that the atmosphere of a “Manichaean world” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 41) is a primary reason for the general decline in mental health throughout the colonial era. This analogy is for the colonial world, which is morally distinct and geographically separated into two zones.

The author describes this dichotomy when he writes about how the settler’s realm is physically advanced, secure, and clean, and it is abundant with all the resources required for a sustainable way of life; “a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things” whilst the town of the colonised is “a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute … hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light” (Fanon, 1963, pp.38–39).

The juxtaposing language used to explain the opposite nature demonstrates how the settlers could prosper in the land that belonged to someone else – the natives. Essentially, “Manicheism […] dehumanises the native [and] it turns him into an animal” (Fanon, 1963, p.42). Thus demonstrating that colonisation has dehumanising effects on the people and the nation and causes negative emotions such as bitterness and resentment.

As a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon holds the same position that the brutality of colonialism has contributed to an increase in mental illnesses and disorders. In chapter five, Fanon meticulously identifies the subtle differences among the many instances of mental illness brought on by colonial violence.

Fanon is aware of a direct relationship between the two concepts, which tends to have a long-lasting effect even after decolonisation. Therefore, Fanon’s claim that violence is a “cleansing force” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 94) is weak because he has already explained in detail how targeted acts of violence and an overall climate of physical insecurity cause a wide range of mental disorders, such as depression, PTSD, hallucinations, and many others.
The Algerian War: A Deep Dive into Colonialism’s Psychological and Physical Traumas

In his book, Fanon explores the Algerian War and how colonialism is a “fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals” (Fanon, 1963, p.249). As the war for freedom progressed, there was significant damage to the people that left them institutionalised in hospitals. He writes case studies on person B, an Algerian man who had “insomnia and persistent headaches” (Fanon, 1963, p.254) and how B’s wife had been “dishonoured” by a French officer who told B to forget about her (Fanon, 1963, p.255).

This is another illustration of the heinous atrocities of colonialism. The fact that B’s wife is raped to get close to B underlines the utter dominance of the French colonists over the Algerian people. However, it is interesting to note that in all his cases, Fanon focuses on the impact of the physical violence of colonialism and does not include how sexual violence was used in the Algerian war.


This point is not to diminish the physical violence of colonialism. But if violence is to be considered, all types of violence must be included – especially sexual violence. Branche explores in ‘Sexual Violence in the Algerian War’ (2009) how sexual violence was prevalent in the Algerian War and how “rapes happened, and repeatedly happened” (Branche, 2009, p.248).

She explores how the systematic use of sexual abuse was a technique of cruelty and humiliation (for both men and women) committed by the French army. It was a brutal, dehumanising, and consistent torture, and although death was typically the outcome, it was not the intended outcome.

Colonialism directly links to other types of violence different from physical violence. Branche examines this when Fanon does not discuss it in his book, though it is crucial to understanding colonialism and violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Branche, R., 2009. Sexual Violence in the Algerian War. In: D. Herzog, ed. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, Genders, and Sexualities in History. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp.247–260. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234291_10.

Burke, E., 1976. Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. Daedalus, 105(1), pp.127–135.

Fanon, F., 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Ighilahriz, L (2001) Algérienne (gathered by Anne Nivat), Paris: Fayard/Calmann-Levy.

Sonnleitner, M.W., 1987. Of Logic and Liberation: Frantz Fanon on Terrorism. Journal of Black Studies, 17(3), pp.287–304.

The Rebel’s Clinic—a wrong critique of Frantz Fanon

A new biography of Frantz Fanon debates the anti-colonial thinker’s legacy, writes Nadia Sayed

Nadia Sayed
SOCIALIST WORKER
Saturday 16 November 2024

The Rebel’s Clinic: the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz

When it comes to radical thinkers and fighters, Frantz Fanon is among the most enduring of our time.

Today, after more than 12 months of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, people are once again turning to Fanon’s ideas. He was very clear on the difference between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed.

In his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote, “Colonialism is not a thinking machine. It is violence in its natural state and will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Adam Shatz’s book, The Rebel’s Clinic, is among the most effective of recent efforts to understand Fanon’s life and ideas. He draws on a wealth of resources and interviews to produce his book.

Born in the French colony of Martinique in 1925, Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in France where he faced his most bitter encounters of racism. He joined the Algerian resistance to the French occupation while operating a clinic there in the 1950s.

Among those interviewed are colleagues of Fanon including Alice Cherki, an Algerian psychoanalyst, and Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, a militant activist who was Fanon’s secretary.

Shatz weaves the influences on Fanon’s life and the debates around him into the events of his life in great detail. One of the great strengths of Shatz’s book is the way he evokes the era Fanon lived in—the era of great anti-colonial struggles.

Early on in his biography, Shatz makes it clear that he’s an admirer of Fanon, but also thinks he is wrongly sanctified. But, at times, Shatz goes beyond a critical examination of Fanon’s ideas. At the start of the book, he describes Fanon as a man of “as many illusions as illuminations”, a sentiment that is a theme throughout the book.

For instance, in discussing Fanon’s relationship to the Algerian liberation movement, Shatz implies that Fanon almost imposed a vision of the movement that wasn’t shared by Algerians.

In Shatz’s account, Fanon saw the Algerian struggle as part of a global struggle. Shatz aruges that most Algerians saw it as a North African struggle that had nothing to do with the fight against apartheid in South Africa or against the Portuguese in Angola.

There are a number of issues with this interpretation. Crucially, Shatz doesn’t acknowledge the debates within the liberation movement.

Disappointingly for a biography on one of the richest anti-colonial thinkers, Shatz’s book avoids discussion of Israel’s genocide and how Fanon relates to the Palestinian resistance. Elsewhere, Shatz has addressed how we apply Fanon’s ideas to Palestine today—he tries to undermine support for Palestinians’ right to resist.

He emphasises Fanon’s warnings against “vengeful” and “undisciplined” violence against the colonisers.

When discussing Israel’s genocide, he emphasises the indefensibility of the “murderous” actions of 7 October, equating it to the violence of Israeli state terror.


Frantz Fanon, racism and revolution

Fanon did warn against undisciplined violence. But he did not do so as a condition of supporting people’s right to resist colonialism. There are important criticisms of Fanon. He said that Karl Marx was right to point to the power of the working class in advanced capitalist countries.

But Fanon argued that the same didn’t apply in the Global South where workers were “most pampered by the colonial regime”.

Yet, in the years after Fanon’s death in 1961, Africa was awash with working class struggles that shook the corrupt post-colonial leaders Fanon hated. Shatz’s book is an important contribution to the study of Fanon.

But Leo Zeilig’s biography offers a better insight, from the perspective of an activist, about the most important lessons from Fanon’s life and his ideas that can guide our struggles today.The Rebel’s Clinic: The revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz (Bloomsbury), £22.50

Interview


“Defeatism Has No Place” in Liberation Struggles, Frantz Fanon’s Daughter Says


For Black August, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France sets the record straight on her father’s revolutionary legacy.

By Frances Madeson ,

Truthout

August 19, 2025

Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, speaks during an anti-racist rally on September 5, 2020, in Paris, France.Thierry Nectoux / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images


Public gatherings this week in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana — featuring an especially distinctive guest — will honor the legacy of revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). The Black Alliance for Peace, an African internationalist organization committed to peace and opposition to war and imperialism, and Cooperation Jackson, which is building a solidarity economy anchored by worker-owned co-ops in West Jackson, are co-hosting several Black August events with Fanon’s eldest daughter. Mireille Fanon Mendès-France is a jurist, an educator, and an anti-racism expert who passionately shares her father’s commitment to rebellion against colonialism in its many forms. She founded the Frantz Fanon Foundation in 2007 to connect his theoretical work to ongoing anti-colonialist struggles like those Black communities throughout the Deep South are facing, especially the kind of ongoing mass displacement that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson told Truthout that Fanon Mendès-France has a great deal to share about her father’s contributions in raising consciousness about what it takes to fight against fascism, “because that is what we are staring down.”

Fanon fought the Nazis in World War II with the Free French Forces. Later, he fought for independence against the reactionary colonial regime in Algeria, which, Akuno said, used Nazi tactics against the national liberation movement. “We are doing this consciousness raising in a period where they are deliberately erasing all oppositional history and knowledge, and they’re doing it very intentionally under the color of law. If we don’t recall the lessons of our earlier generations who fought against colonial erasure, who fought against white supremacy, then we’re gonna lose this battle before it even begins.” Akuno explained that a backdrop to all this is the ongoing genocide in Palestine; Fanon Mendès-France is directly tied into the struggle of Arab and North African/Southwest Asian people. “There’s many intersections that we’re trying to get at this year, and she’s one of the best people who encapsulates it all.”

Shortly before her travels to the U.S., Mireille Fanon Mendès-France spoke to Truthout by phone about combating disinformation about her father’s work, her eagerness to be in community in the U.S. with anti-colonial activists, and why defeatism is not an option. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Frances Madeson: The centenary of Frantz Fanon has inspired commemorative events all over the world — in Martinique, the Caribbean island where he was born on July 20, 1925, into French colonial dominance in the region; across Europe, where he studied psychiatry and began to write explicitly about the anti-Black racism he encountered there; in Africa, where he lived and was engaged during the bloody struggle for Algerian independence from colonial France; and in the United States, where he died prematurely from leukemia on December 6, 1961, at only 36 years old.

His main books — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — are still in print and have been translated into more than 25 languages. His singular contributions to anti-colonial psychiatry and humanism are widely studied and deeply embedded in the practices of a growing cadre of Fanonian psychoanalysts who deploy his insights in the service of fostering anti-colonial consciousness in the Palestine solidarity movement and beyond. One would think Frantz Fanon’s legacy would be a settled matter. But is it?

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Mireille Fanon Mendès-France: Unfortunately, no. The work of decolonial emancipation remains to be done. But before getting to these points, I would like to emphasize that this centenary has given rise to numerous events, particularly in Martinique. One was presented on March 15, 2025, by an organization founded by the Békés — who are descendants of former colonizers and enslavers who continue to control the island’s economy. This association, Tous Créoles, hosted an exceptional conference on Frantz Fanon entitled “Fanon the Humanist.”

Their aim was to demonstrate that the philosophy of Tous Créoles is in line with Frantz Fanon’s by extracting certain quotes and taking them out of context, thereby reinforcing their positions: “I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanized my fathers. … I, a man of color, want only one thing: that the instrument never dominate man.” The use of these quotes supports their argument. Likewise, “There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden. There is a struggle for the triumph of human dignity, for the disappearance of human humiliation, whatever the origin of that humiliation.” These quotes can be interpreted in any way one wishes if one remains on the surface, but above all, they can be used to demonstrate that Frantz Fanon was not in contradiction with the dominant colonial thinking, particularly that of the Békés, who for several years have been trying to reverse the burden of proof by demonstrating, through this kind of instrumentalization of Frantz Fanon’s thinking, among other things, that they stand alongside the descendants of enslaved people.

These Békés are trying to do what successive Israeli governments have tried to do with the Palestinian people, victims of an illegal occupation that constitutes a war crime and genocide. The Békés try to impose their own agenda by showing their credentials to those they despise, because their colonizer’s unconscious has never abandoned the coloniality of power that led them to consider Black bodies as unimportant because they are commodifiable. Above all, they are trying to promote the myth propagated by the anti-Black (and anti-Arab and anti-Islamic) right wing of “living together,” which means that the dominated must accept the yoke of the dominant without ever questioning this ancestral domination rooted in the racist capitalist system. In twisting Fanon’s thinking to a message that descendants of enslavers and the enslaved should live together in harmony without any reckoning, this is an instrumentalization of Fanonian thinking, and part of a disturbing tendency toward normalization of institutional racism, négrophobia, and colonialism which we see constantly since October 7, 2023.

Why is there so much will to transform the thinking of Frantz Fanon to say things he did not say and to defend positions which are absolutely contradictory to his own? Why does Fanon become compatible with the most racist white thinking, which continues to enrich itself on the backs of Black people?

Let us not forget that Frantz Fanon was a man of rupture, no compromise with the enemy: as presented by the Békés, he becomes consensual, stripping him of his radicalism to make him acceptable to those who rejected him for decades, criticizing him for resigning from his position as chief physician at the Blida hospital and for committing himself intellectually, physically, politically, and in solidarity to the struggle for liberation of a people who had suffered under colonial rule for over a century.

In another event, organized by the Cercle Frantz Fanon, one of their speakers said that Fanon’s ideas are no longer accurate or relevant because in Martinique, or in Guadeloupe, which are overseas French colonies, there is no more colonialism. As proof, he said, “Have you ever seen a colonizer giving monthly social services to the colonized people? Have you seen in a colonized country, one family having two or even three cars!?” What is the benefit for participants at a conference organized as part of the centenary celebrations to listen to such statements? It is a non-starter, and, above all, it closes the debate. Does Fanon get him down? What does this thinker say to him about his difficulty in understanding the current world, which is part of a colonization that has never been abandoned but is truly violent? Is the return to the future here?

Fortunately, there was another event, a conference sponsored by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA), and the Frantz Fanon Foundation organized one plenary. The foundation has close ties and works with grassroots organizations fighting for their rights while questioning their practices in the light of leaders who have reflected on the nature of anti-colonialist engagement from a decolonial approach. The goal was for the panelists to share their thoughts so that CPA participants could step outside their intellectual positions and confront the difficult economic situation. The economic sector is under a stranglehold by the Békés, as it was under the period of enslavement and after abolition.

In Martinique just last fall there was an economic riot: the Vie Chère protests against the high cost of living, during which 140 protesters were arrested and four were killed. Activists have filed a complaint against the high cost of living, aiming to put an end to decades of anti-competitive and abusive practices organized by the Békés with the full support of the government. This is a prime example of colonial power through economic capture, enriching a handful of actors at the expense of the “Non-Beings.” For the Frantz Fanon Foundation, it was also a question of reflecting, based on these struggles, on the role that a philosophical approach should play in the quest for radical change in the economic model of colonized territories.

I’m reluctant to share this with you, but since you’re coming to the U.S., I think you should know: A KKK flyer was distributed in Cincinnati, Ohio, widely enough that a city councilman felt compelled to issue a dignified rebuttal in a Facebook post. In it, he entreats state politicians to stop fanning damaging flames of racism about his city.

In the spirit of internationalism, you’re set to meet with two Black-led organizations unapologetically resisting the rise of a neo-Confederate order in the U.S. — the Black Alliance for Peace and Cooperation Jackson. What are you hoping to build with them?

We have no choice but to build alliances between dominated victims of négrophobia; alliances based on ethical principles considering that the fight against institutional racism and for land and human dignity are essential if we want to change the world. But this is not enough; everyone agrees, including the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank. The essential principle on which we must agree is that no change will be possible within the racist, capitalist, and liberal system. This system has killed our ancestors and continues to spoil, kill, exclude, and commit genocide.

The poster you sent me, “Arm yourselves, white citizens of Cincinnati,” speaks loudly about this return to the future. We really need to be concerned and prepare ourselves. In the United States, will Black people have to endure the return of the KKK? Will those who claim to be in solidarity remain as silent as they were during the first six months of the genocide organized by the Israeli state with the complicit support of many members of the international community?

That is why meeting, exchanging ideas, sharing thoughts, and perhaps setting up an alert platform is part of the resistance struggle. If we do not resist and if we do not equip ourselves with the means to resist, we are, in a sense, dead. One might wonder if it is not too late, but in this fight, defeatism has no place.

Kali Akuno told Truthout that one of his aims for your joint events is to link the legacy of resistance and sacrifice in Africa with the history of struggle and resistance that came out of Hurricane Katrina, which he says is downplayed.

He was part of the New Day Collective’s sustained resistance to the ideology permeating the Green Dot Plan, an actual development plan floated in 2006 with a nefarious map to indicate where the priorities for the city’s recovery should be. Areas in the green dots would be left as open space in a bold land grab to create a “New” New Orleans — smaller, whiter and more affluent. From the heart of one of those green dots, their Fight Back Center was the epicenter of the struggle to save public housing throughout New Orleans for years. Yet, the center’s sustained role has been erased in dominant media narratives and the city’s militant history has not been widely celebrated in Katrina commemorations.

Akuno also says that in order to keep New Orleans from being further gentrified, a new struggle is going to have to be raised.

I agree with Kali; I’m also interested in discussing Fanon’s thinking, his thinking in action, with people touched by the Katrina disaster.

The trip is not just to make a declaration, or to pay tribute to Frantz Fanon, even if he helps us to continue the fight.

Are the outcomes of willful climate inaction — the terrifying wildfires, smoke-filled summer air, droughts, and floods and storms like Katrina — related to coloniality?

It is another way to kill the people, to maintain the permanent war against the people, to make their environment uninhabitable.

Looking to international institutions like the United Nations is not the solution. In fact, it’s part of our problem. The UN is the perfect example of paradoxical thinking — something for the people, but they act against the people.

The best example is Haiti: the cholera the UN spread, the mass death it caused, and everything they’ve done with The Core Group [a political entity formed by a UN Security Council Resolution in 2004; its creation was originally proposed as a six-month interim transition support measure, yet it endures to this day].

Even as we’re talking, there’s a palpable dread of imminent mass death in Gaza because the U.S. and Israel are actively starving the people. How is the emancipation of Black people in the U.S. related to the liberation, then emancipation, of Palestinians?

What we have to understand is what was done against African people from the mid-15th century until now, is the same paradigm in Gaza — a continuation of the permanent war against people, authorized by the early papal bulls of the Doctrine of Discovery. You want something, first you kill the people: like it was done in the transatlantic slave trade. The powerful fight against the people, because for this system, the problem is the people.

If we want to get our emancipation, we have to try to invert the relation of power, because until now, the capitalist system has been stronger than the social movement. But maybe we have to think about how to be in solidarity with people under attack, how to be engaged a little bit differently — what does it mean to be engaged and in solidarity with people who are fighting?


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Frances Madeson has written about liberation struggles in the U.S. and abroad for Ms. Magazine, VICE, YES! Magazine, The Progressive Magazine, Tablet Magazine, American Theatre Magazine and Indian Country Today. She is also the author of the comic novel Cooperative Village.

The Wretched of Palestine: Frantz Fanon Diagnosed the Pathology of Colonialism and Urged Revolutionary Humanism

By Dan Dinello

April 8, 2024

Source: Informed Comment

Frantz Fanon at a press conference during a writers’ conference in Tunis, 1959. Frantz Fanon Archives



“The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world can only be challenged by out and out violence.”

The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.

In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”

Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.

The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip — it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”

Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.

An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”

In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”

The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.

As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.

After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.

The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”

The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.

Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”

Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.

“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”

In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.

The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”

Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.

Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.

Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”

Would Frantz Fanon Have Supported the Oct. 7 Massacre? 

His Biographer Isn’t So Sure

How did a single chapter from a book written over six decades ago by a Black psychiatrist, who never discussed the Israel-Palestine issue, become widely cited in relation to October 7? 

A new biography explores the life of Frantz Fanon.

By Etan Nechin

February 5, 2024

Source: Haaretz

A banner quoting Frantz Fanon outside the Minneapolis Police Department following a police shooting in 2015: "We revolt simply because for many reasons we can no longer breathe." Credit: Tony Webster


On the morning of October 7, as images of the torn fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel proliferated on social media, so too did quotations by Frantz Fanon.

The writings of this Martinique-born philosopher, psychiatrist and leftist, who is noted for his work on racism, anti-colonialism and violence, have become emblematic of Algeria’s struggle for independence from France in the 1950s and early ’60s. On Black Saturday, his quotes were used to argue that the massacre conducted by Hamas was a direct and inevitable reaction to “colonial” oppression by Israel. One of the most-quoted lines that day, taken from Fanon’s seminal work “The Wretched of the Earth,” states: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Fanon, whose life was cut short at age 36 in 1961, has posthumously lent his voice to an array of causes – stretching from America’s civil rights movement to Pan-Africanism, resonating particularly with Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestinian activists. “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Black Skin, White Masks” have entered the academic canon, regularly appearing on humanities department syllabi. For his champions, he occupies the role of post-colonial herald, a prophet of insurgency, articulating the sentiments of the downtrodden.

Yet the breadth of Fanon’s intellect and the nuances of his political stance often remain in the shadows for those who invoke him.

In his extensive new biography “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon,” Adam Shatz ventures beyond the conventional view of Fanon as an icon of political violence and the Algerian revolution. He offers a three-dimensional portrait of the man, situating him within the context of his own life and times, while also engaging with the intellectual milieu that shaped – and was in turn shaped by – his revolutionary ideas.

There are existing biographies of Fanon, but Shatz – by day the U.S. editor of London Review of Books – says he was motivated to write his because he felt that none of the others “had captured the passion, the tragic passion, of Fanon’s life in psychiatry, activism and writing.”


“Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address deep-seated issues. This didn’t happen.”

In an interview at his Brooklyn home, he says he sought to write something “that would situate Fanon in a larger group of writers and revolutionaries addressing the same predicament: not only how to dismantle the colonial order, but to create something better in its place. A powerful additional motivation was the Trump presidency, and the unfolding drama in France over Islam, ‘integration,’ police violence and jihadism – the embers of Algeria could still be felt there.”
West Indian skin, French mask

The book’s opening chapters explore the genesis of Fanon’s philosophy, mapping it back to his youth and the stark contrast between the profound disjunction between his nascent hopes and the realities he later confronted. It illustrates how his theories were a synthesis of thoughts crafted in solitude at his writing desk and those forged in the wider arena of social and political engagement.

Fanon was born in the French West Indies to a middle class family in July 1925. Initially, he did not even perceive himself as Black; he identified as French – a sentiment echoed by all of his peers on the island of Martinique. The phrase “nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors the Gauls”) was a mantra for Martinican children like Fanon, despite their African heritage.

The complexities of race and class on the island influenced Fanon, particularly the “pigmentocracy” that permeated society. However, his family’s relative comfort shielded him to some extent – until the Vichy government’s arrival in 1940 unveiled a more sinister side of France characterized by racism and fascism.

This prompted the teenage Fanon to volunteer for the Free French Forces, where he confronted a colonial army rife with racial hierarchies. Despite being treated as an “honorary European” (Fanon was injured and received the Croix de Guerre military decoration), he saw firsthand the disparities in how Arabs and Africans were treated, and grappled with the irony of fighting against Nazism in an army practicing its own form of racial supremacy.

This contradiction was Fanon’s first jolt toward political consciousness, a feeling reinforced after the war when he faced rejection from French women who refused to dance with a Black liberator.



The U.S. cover of “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon” by Adam Shatz. Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

After his release from the army, these experiences drew him to Négritude – a cultural and political movement among French-speaking Black intellectuals that emphasized African values and heritage, and protested colonialism and racial discrimination. He was also drawn to the works of Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, playwright and politician who would become his first mentor. Fanon moved to France to continue his studies, eventually enrolling in medicine at the University of Lyon, where he specialized in psychiatry.

“A pivotal moment for Fanon occurred in France, described in ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ when a little white boy is traveling on the train with his mother and points to Fanon and says ‘Look maman, a nègre.’ Here’s a little boy and yet he’s already a ‘racial expert’: he already comes to associate a Black man like Fanon with danger, with menace, and Fanon realizes that in the eyes of the French, he is a Black man,” Shatz says. “He is not simply a French man of color, as he was raised to believe; he does not enjoy the anonymity of a typical French person. And I think that is certainly the primal scene in Fanon’s work.”

This incident challenged Fanon’s belief in the French promise of color blindness and propelled him toward exploring various philosophies. These included Negritude, Senegalese statesman and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s mystical understanding of Black consciousness, and eventually European existential philosophy – which he found in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, the magazine edited by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

“You have to imagine Fanon as a man on a quest for identity during his time in Lyon. He found himself in a city that felt desolate, markedly homogeneous in its demographic, save for a small community of North African men. As a physician, Fanon came to treat these individuals. And in doing so, they left a significant imprint on his evolving sense of self,” Shatz notes.

Intrigued by iconoclastic psychiatric thinkers aligned with Marxism and surrealism who delved into madness in provocative ways, Fanon saw psychiatry’s goal as liberating individuals from internal complexes that obstructed their social interactions. He characterized mental illness as a “pathology of freedom,” devising his own discourse on restoring a person’s sense of identity and belonging, particularly after experiences of marginalization or mental health challenges.

In Lyon, Fanon’s encounters with North African migrant workers led to a pivotal realization about the “pathology of colonialism and racism.” Recognizing that these diagnoses overlooked the deeper, systemic issues stemming from oppression, Fanon was inspired to develop his concept of disalienation. This approach aimed not only to heal individual psychological distress, but also to address and mend the collective trauma caused by colonial and racist structures. This revelation bridged Fanon’s medical practice with his anti-colonial activism, forming a foundational element of his broader philosophical and political work.

“Fanon didn’t invent anything or create new concepts; he was a bricoleur, crafting a syncretic language from psychiatry, Negritude, phenomenology and anti-colonialism. The language he developed is highly distinctive, though the concepts are often used for convenience,” Shatz explains.


I think Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought share the same kind of historical fatalism that defines much of Zionism. For classical Zionism, a Jew in exile is living in a kind of hell, where it’s always possibly 1939.

Adam Shatz

“Fanon’s work, while deeply invested in the collective endeavor of liberation from the shackles of colonial dominance, economic exploitation and political oppression, does not solely focus on these broader societal issues. He also maintains a profound interest in the psyche of the individual, advocating for the liberation of colonized individuals from psychological complexes such as despair, passivity, feelings of futility and a perceived incapacity to influence historical events,” he says. “It’s important to recall that Fanon is not simply a revolutionary who infuses his political writings with psychiatric insights. He is a revolutionary critic of psychiatry.”

Although Fanon’s first book, 1952’s “Black Skin, White Masks,” was born from this period, Shatz writes that “it is neither a memoir nor a clinical study, but rather an unusual mixture of genres and discursive registers: analytic and poetic, despairing and hopeful, solemn and sarcastic.”

The biographer places “Black Skin, White Masks” within the broader historical and intellectual era, capturing the post-World War II revolutionary spirit that swept through Europe and the developing nations of the “global south.” On a journey of self-discovery, Fanon began to reject his initial mentors. This period was marked by national liberation movements, the influence of Marxism and the push for decolonization – a context within which Fanon found resonance and, ultimately, his place.
The guise of normality

Eleven months before the Algerian War of Independence began in November 1954, Fanon started working at a psychiatric institute just outside of Algiers. “Fanon didn’t come to Algeria as a revolutionary but a colonial administrator,” says Shatz. “It was not uncommon for France to send ‘assimilated’ West Indian professionals to the colonies to serve as examples of all the good things France had done for the natives, to serve as models for Africans,” he adds sarcastically.

“From the moment France colonized Algeria in 1830, it took the French approximately 40 years to ‘pacify’ the country – an endeavor the French considered pacification, but which for Algerians was a brutal invasion. During this period, about one-third of the Algerian population was decimated by violence and disease. By 1848, amid ongoing colonization efforts, France had divided Algeria into three departments and began governing the land as an integral administrative part of France itself, effectively transforming Algeria into an extension of France. Despite this, Algerians were not granted the rights of French citizens; they were subjects and were not recognized as citizens until the final stages of French rule.

“Algerians were violently uprooted, their lands confiscated, their language relegated to that of a foreign tongue and they were, in essence, turned into spectators within their own territory. For Fanon, these experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. As I suggest in my book, Fanon perceived colonialism not merely as an oppressive regime, but as a pathological system that presented itself under the guise of normality.”



Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Credit: Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

Shatz demonstrates how Fanon’s work shaped his thought and vice versa – whether implementing his radical psychiatric approaches on Algerian patients, or traveling to the Algerian backwoods where he witnesses local rituals and becomes enamored with the rural Algerians. When the war begins, Fanon knows which side he’s on: he is no longer a Frenchman.

“He begins to think of himself as an Algerian. He’s not a Muslim; he’s an atheist. He’s not an Arab; he’s a Black man from the West Indies. And yet he begins to develop this fusional relationship with the Algerian struggle – and in the course of that, he reimagines what it means to be Algerian. He thinks of Algerian nationalism as a kind of nationalism of the will, a nationalism that anyone can join. Arabs and Muslims, who are colonized of course, but also European sympathizers – or, for that matter, members of the Jewish minority,” Shatz says.

Initially, Fanon sought to join the Algerian National Liberation Front as a soldier, but the movement utilized his medical and intellectual expertise in other critical ways. He operated a covert clinic to treat wounded Algerian fighters, contributed writings to the army’s El Moudjahid publication and took on a variety of roles, including acting as an ambassador for the provisional Algerian government. This period of his life followed his expulsion from Algeria in 1956, during which time he resided in Tunis and Accra (where he served as the movement’s traveling ambassador in Africa).

Shatz paints a broad picture of the region and portrays Fanon’s relationships with Algerian revolutionaries, white French Marxists who came to support the revolution, and African leaders such as Patrice Lumumba. He also highlights the blind spots that Fanon, in his zeal, either overlooked or dismissed – including the Islamic component of the Algerian struggle.


It’s impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7 attack. But I don’t think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme.

Adam Shatz

“Fanon, I think, imagined that the anti-colonial revolution might provide the kind of modernization that the French were claiming to bring with their civilizational project,” Shatz says. He highlights an essay Fanon wrote in 1959 called “Algeria Unveiled”: “It’s a captivating essay that explores the evolving symbolism of the veil,” his biographer says. “For Fanon, the veil can represent both subjugation and resistance. Fanon believed that through their revolutionary actions – like the Algerian women who planted bombs for the National Liberation Front – these women were not only fighting against colonialism but also challenging patriarchy.

“He hoped that, post-independence, Algerian men would recognize and embrace the women’s rights to freedom and equality. However, the outcome was different. While there’s a vibrant feminist movement in Algeria, the societal changes Fanon hoped for were not fully realized. Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address deep-seated issues. This didn’t happen.”
Apostle of violence

One of the issues facing Shatz as a biographer was Fanon’s aversion to documenting his private life. “He kept things close to the chest. He expressed disdain for those who wrote memoirs, viewing it as a bourgeois pastime,” he says. “The only real traces of Fanon’s personal life emerge in fleeting passages in his work, often masked by the use of the royal we pronoun. Fanon’s reluctance to write about himself makes the task of his biographer particularly challenging.”

Yet while the book may not contain new archival discoveries about Fanon, its depth is enhanced by the relationships Shatz fostered over the years with individuals close to Fanon. These include Algerian historian Mohamed Harbi, Algerian psychoanalyst Alice Cherki and, most notably, the late Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, Fanon’s secretary and confidante – aka Fanon’s “tape recorder” – who typed “The Wretched of the Earth” from his dictations.

Shatz, 51, has a rich history in journalism and a deep connection to the regions Fanon wrote about. Coming from a left-leaning, secular Jewish family in Massachusetts, his fieldwork took him to Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt. His published works include “Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel” and “Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination.” In recognition of his contributions to French culture, in 2021 he was named a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. In this book, Shatz weaves together those years of travel, encounters and intellectual explorations into Fanon’s world, in all its contradictions and complexities.

No Fanon work has generated more debate than “The Wretched of the Earth,” which was published in 1961, the year of his death. It is a trenchant analysis of the psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism, advocating for decolonization and the liberation of oppressed peoples. It presents a powerful critique of colonial rule and a call to arms for revolutionary change, rooted in Fanon’s own experiences in Algeria.



The family of Liraz Assulin, who was killed by Hamas terrorists while attending the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, creating a memorial for her near Kibbutz Kfar Azza last month. Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters


Fanon had a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might call revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively and find support for one’s argument – in this case, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – as a classic example of Fanonian struggle.

Adam Shatz

Its first chapter, “On Violence,” is also its most discussed. In it, Fanon discusses the role of violence in the decolonization process, arguing that it has a regenerative force for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity and overthrow the colonial system. He views violence as a cathartic response to the violence enacted by the colonizer and a crucial component in the struggle for liberation.

While many readers saw “The Wretched of the Earth” as nothing but a call to wanton violence, settling the score with the “master” – as many of his appalled contemporaries did – Shatz offers a more complex analysis.

For instance, he draws attention to a passage from “The Wretched of the Earth” where Fanon addresses this directly: “Racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation.”

In Shatz’ understanding of Fanon’s thinking, there is a tension between Fanon the doctor, whose first commandment is “do no harm,” to the revolutionary for whom violence is a way of achieving liberation.

“The longest chapter in the book is ‘On Violence.’ But the second longest chapter is ‘Colonial Warfare and Mental Disorders,’ which is an absolutely wrenching chapter where he writes not only about the impact of colonial violence on the colonized after independence. He also writes about the impact of anti-colonial violence on anti-colonial fighters who are haunted by the acts that they’ve committed,” the author says.

Shatz doesn’t argue that Fanon shies away from violence, but that his exploration of violence is phenomenological, focusing on the lived experience and the psychological transformation it brings about – such as a sense of empowerment or regeneration. This viewpoint is not unique to Fanon and is common in nationalist movements.

Furthermore, Shatz highlights Fanon’s poetic inclination, influenced by Negritude poets and his Caribbean background, which infuses his work with rich metaphors and a deep connection to historical struggles against oppression like the 18th-century Haitian Revolution.

Shatz contends that the misinterpretation of Fanon is partly due to the incorrect translation of the term “violence” as “cleansing” rather than “disintoxicating,” which Fanon intended to describe as an unfortunate but necessary step in the journey toward decolonization and reclaiming identity.

That misreading is attributed partly to Sartre’s militant preface to the book, in which he infamously stated: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone – to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”



Simone de Beauvoir, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre at a Parisian restaurant in 1970. Credit: AFP

Fanon’s afterlife

Since Fanon’s death from leukemia and double pneumonia in December 1961, just seven months before Algeria’s independence, there have been numerous misuses and misreadings of his work. Shatz addresses this in an epilogue dedicated to Fanon’s posthumous influence, exploring how his ideas have been referenced and absorbed in various fields.

This epilogue includes subchapters on Fanon’s impact on Black liberation movements, psychiatry, post-colonial literature, the European migration discourse, pan-African and East Asian revolutionary thought, and Palestinian liberation – even though Fanon never directly wrote about either Palestine or Israel.

Fanon’s specter is invoked so frequently that Shatz has continued to expand on this epilogue even after his book was officially completed. A few weeks after the Hamas attack, Shatz wrote a piece in London Review of Books called “Vengeful Pathologies,” in which his nuanced application of Fanon’s theories in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly regarding Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7, transcend a simplistic interpretation of Fanon as merely advocating violence.

Instead, Shatz uses Fanon to delve into the psychological ramifications of colonization and the complex motivations behind the use of violence in liberation struggles.

As for why Fanon is suddenly so prevalent, Shatz observes that he “had a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might call revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively and find support for one’s argument – in this case, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – as a classic example of Fanonian struggle. The textual evidence is there. Just as Marx has been reduced to class struggle, and Freud to the unconscious and the Oedipus complex, so Fanon has been reduced to violence. And like Marx, he has lent himself to both vulgar and sophisticated readings.

“It’s impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7 attack,” Shatz continues. “But I don’t think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme. As he writes in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’: ‘The colonized person is a persecuted person who dreams constantly of becoming the persecutor.’ Whether he would have endorsed this kind of attack, however, one can only speculate. A militant reader of Fanon might say that he would have, and there are grounds for making this claim. But ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is also full of warnings about the danger of turning hatred and revenge into a political program, and Fanon insists that an anti-colonial struggle must overcome the ‘primitive Manichaeism’ of the colonial system.”

The renaissance of Fanon comes at a time when, according to Shatz, certain styles of thought – such as Afro-pessimism and the decolonial movement – have tended to substitute ontology for history. “Instead of seeing these identities as products of history and as entities that can be unmade, they view them as fixed and essential. Thus, the person who is the child, the grandchild or the great-grandchild of a colonized nation is somehow eternally colonized. Right? The notion is that anti-Black oppression is something that can never be transformed; it’s simply an irreducible, ontological part of societies under Western domination.

“I think Fanon was very skeptical of this style of thought – which, by the way, has a lot in common with Zionism. I think Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought share the same kind of historical fatalism that defines much of Zionism. For classical Zionism, a Jew in exile is living in a kind of hell, where it’s always possibly 1939. The only authentic life is among Jews in Israel. And I think there are many parallels. To me, that all speaks of the great doubt that has fallen over so many societies – most societies, arguably – that there is any horizon beyond what we know today.”

“The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Adam Shatz, is out now.