Frantz Fanon Quotes on Politics
Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) gave anticolonial political philosophy its founding statements. The earlier book develops a phenomenological-psychoanalytic analysis of the colonial situation as it appears to the colonized subject, integrating Sartrean existentialism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Negritude poetry into a sustained account of the wound of colonization at the level of personal identity. The Wretched of the Earth — composed in the final months of Fanon's life during the Algerian war of independence and prefaced by Sartre — develops the political-theoretical analysis of colonization, the strategic role of revolutionary violence, the perils of national bourgeoisies that succeed colonial administrations, and the cultural reconstruction of the postcolonial nation. The framework defined the subsequent tradition of postcolonial political theory through Said, Spivak, Mbembe, and Mignolo.
Quotes
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
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“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“What matters now is not to know the world but to change it.”