Lovers of Things Fall Apart, Les Misérables, The Hunger Games. It is a lesson we still have not learnt and we are still making the same mistakes with very similar results.įans of Conrad, Morrison, Friere. It can hardly be expected that at the end of empire and colonization people wave their colonial masters goodbye with a cheery "Thanks for all the fun!" Fanon understood this very well. However, what we forget is that the original colonization was much more violent and horrific. People since have argued that the chapter on the necessity of violence is powerful, of course, but exaggerated and a bit over the top. The opening of the book caused great controversy "decolonization is always a violent phenomenon". What this book really does of course is give you a sense of colonialism in Africa the devastation and injustice. The chapters about psychiatric disorders is very good and the descriptions gut wrenching although many of the symptoms described would today be identified as post traumatic stress disorder. This was the zeitgeist of the left at the time, before feminism made an impact. When Fanon talks about intellectuals he refers to them as men. The struggle is by men and the book is, on the surface, for men. There are significant problems with the book which are clear now. Fanon examines nationalism, imperialism and the colonial inheritance and manages to turn the traditional definition of the lumpenproletariat on its head. It is written before Vietnam, before the changes in the sixties and by an eminent psychiatrist enmeshed in the struggle for freedom in Algeria. It is the classic critique of colonialism from the Marxist left with a powerful introduction by Sartre. This book is angry passionate, but written with great clarity and purpose. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other.įanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. Thus, Gibson and Beneduce contend that Fanon's psychiatric writings also express Fanon's wish, as he puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, to "develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity.A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. The authors argue that Fanon's work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry based on a new concept of culture (anchored to historical events, particular situations, and lived experience) and on the relationship between the psychological and the cultural. Both clinical and political, they draw on another notion of psychiatry that intersects history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. With a focus on Fanon's key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon's psychiatric writings as materials anticipating as well as accompanying Fanon's better known works, written between 19 (Black Skin, White Masks A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth). That is in part because most of his psychiatric writings have remained untranslated. The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his psychiatric work still has only been studied peripherally.
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