Frantz Fanon
AKA: Fanon · Frantz Omar Fanon
The Record
Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, resigned, and joined the National Liberation Front. He finished The Wretched of the Earth as he was dying of leukaemia. It appeared in 1961, the year of his death, with a preface by Sartre more bloodthirsty than the book.
His argument runs like this. Colonisation is more than an economic arrangement. It divides the world into two species and holds them apart by force. The violence that created the colonised is also what undoes them, because returning it restores the self-respect the arrangement destroyed.
The American reception is the point of this file. Black radicals and then white student radicals read a text about French Algeria as a description of the United States. That turned a colonial analysis into a domestic one, and it supplied the internal-colony framing that runs through the Panthers and into Weatherman.
Translations differ. The archive quotes Richard Philcox where it quotes at all, names the edition in the footnote, and marks where Constance Farrington’s earlier rendering reads differently. The wording is what is at stake here.
Relationship Ledger
American radicals read Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth alongside Guevara, whose 1967 message to the Tricontinental called for two, three, many Vietnams. Source: The Wretched of the Earth
Documents
What Frantz Fanon wrote, oldest first. The archive argues from these rather than about them, so they are listed with the standpoint and the class of each, and a reader is free to check any of it.
- The Wretched of the EarthGrove Press, New York
Referenced in
Records whose text names Frantz Fanon. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- Marcuse and Repressive Toleranceis mentioned in
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Régis Debrayis mentioned in