Frantz Fanon 1925 – 1961

Frantz Fanon was a Martinican-born psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary whose work has been foundational for postcolonial theory. Trained in France and posted as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, he came to support the Algerian struggle for independence and resigned to write openly against the colonial order. Black Skin, White Masks examined the psychological deformations imposed by racism, while The Wretched of the Earth analyzed colonial violence and the demands of national liberation. He died of leukemia at the age of thirty-six, shortly before Algerian independence.

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher whose work shaped twentieth-century anti-colonial and decolonial thought. Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, he served in the Free French forces during World War II, studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon, and was appointed head of the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria in 1953.

Fanon's first major work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), develops a phenomenological and psychoanalytic analysis of how colonial regimes shape the psychic lives of the colonized. Drawing on Sartre's existentialism and on Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Fanon argues that the colonized subject's recognition by the colonizer cannot follow Hegel's reciprocal pattern because the colonizer does not seek genuine recognition. The book has been one of the founding texts of postcolonial and critical race theory.

Fanon resigned from his psychiatric position in 1956 to join the Algerian National Liberation Front and worked as a physician, journalist, and ambassador for the FLN until his death from leukemia in 1961 at thirty-six. The Wretched of the Earth, completed during his final illness with a preface by Sartre, is his most influential political work — a sustained philosophical argument for the necessity of revolutionary violence in the colonial situation, alongside searching analyses of the psychology of colonization, the pitfalls of national consciousness, and the prospects for postcolonial culture.