Frantz Fanon and Decolonization

In recent years, Frantz Fanon has increasingly become recognized as one of the most important and formative philosophers or theorists of the mid-twentieth century. His best known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was characterized by Stuart Hall as the “Bible of decolonization”: at that time, the word decolonization referred to the literal process of a colonial country gaining political independence, and Fanon was certainly central to that in colonial Algeria. Very quickly, however, Fanon’s work also became a central text for the Black Panthers in the US. More recently, “decolonization” has come to take on a related meaning, that is critical appraisal of Western culture and its institutions in order to remove the legacies of hierarchical, racialized thinking towards minorities and other cultures. Fanon himself was centrally engaged from the first with this decolonizing process and the question of how to achieve it. As he pointed out, the concept of race was central to colonialism, imperialism and their cultures; Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) was one of the first books to analyze the experience of race in a racialized society from the subjective point of view of the Black person. Fanon himself was a psychiatrist, brought up in the tradition of French psychiatry which draws widely not only on medicalised psychiatry but also psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics and literature. A recent new collection of his psychiatric writings, together with two previously unpublished plays, allows us to understand how probing were his analyses of the colonial situation in all its dimensions, and how extensively he thought about the means for decolonization of the mind as well as the state. In this course we will read widely across Fanon’s writings, while also considering relevant or related work by his contemporaries such as Aimé Césaire and Richard Wright.