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Frantz Fanon (Literary and Critical Theory)

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  2. Frantz Fanon (b. 1925–d. 1961)—psychiatrist, political theorist, poet, polemicist, diplomat, journalist, soldier, doctor, revolutionary—is one of the foremost writers of the 20th century on the topics of racism, colonialism, and decolonization. In his short lifetime, he produced two enduring books: Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks], still regarded as the preeminent study of the lived experience of racism, and Les Damnés de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth], regarded at the time of its publication as “the handbook of decolonization,” and presenting itself to us today as both a clear-eyed prediction of the lasting legacy of neocolonialism, and as a visionary account of a truly postcolonial condition yet to come. These two books encapsulate the major themes not only of Fanon’s writing but also of his extraordinary life. Black Skin, White Masks captures Fanon’s experience as a native of Martinique and the product of a colonial education who came to experience metropolitan racism upon his arrival in France (Fanon, having fought in Europe during the Second World War, returned to France to study medicine). The book draws upon Fanon’s training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis but also upon Marxism, existentialism, the work of the négritude movement, and a number of literary texts in order to analyze the lived experience of racism. Having completed his medical studies, Fanon took up a position at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in November 1953. While working in Algeria, Fanon introduced a number of innovative programs and also authored and co-authored many articles on the practice and theory of psychiatry. However, as he recounts in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon was responsible for treating both Algerians fighting for independence and also French police and army officers—both the tortured and the torturers. This experience was to shape his remarkable theorization of colonial and anticolonial violence, one of the key themes of The Wretched of the Earth, which has inspired ongoing critical debate. In 1956 Fanon resigned his position and joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Tunis, where he served as an editor of the movement’s newspaper, El Moudjahid. It was during this time that Fanon wrote L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Year V of the Algerian Revolution, translated as A Dying Colonialism), his sociological study of the Algerian liberation struggle. Shortly after its publication, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. While undergoing treatment, Fanon worked to produce in a period of ten weeks his last (and what would come to be his most famous) book, The Wretched of the Earth. Published only weeks before his death in December 1961, The Wretched of the Earth remains a key text for postcolonial studies today. Fanon’s unsparing analysis of the movement for decolonization and the struggle toward what he called the “African Revolution”—as well as his call for a new form of humanism not contaminated by the crimes of racism, slavery, and colonialism—continues to resonate with readers today.
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  4. General Overviews
  5. The works listed in this section can be read as introductions to Fanon’s full body of work, in most cases also providing introductory information about his life and activities outside of his writing. Gendzier 1973 was one of the first major critical studies of Fanon’s work in English, written by a scholar of the Middle East and North Africa. Hansen 1977 marks one of the first attempts to read Fanon’s body of work as a totality, examining Fanon’s texts from the perspectives of political philosophy, social science, ideology, and mythmaking. Taylor 1989 is the best and most extended discussion of Fanon’s life and work within the context of Afro-Caribbean politics and culture. Gordon 1995 can be seen in many ways as beginning a new generation of work on Fanon; the author reads Fanon’s work within a tradition of existential phenomenology, in particular the work of Edmund Husserl. Sekyi-Otu 1996 is arguably the most ambitious study of Fanon’s work and certainly among the closest readings: the author reads Fanon’s work as an interconnected oeuvre, “as though [his texts] formed one dramatic dialectical narrative” (p. 4). The illustrated, comic book style of Wyrick 1998 might put off “serious” readers and scholars of Fanon, but it provides an excellent brief introduction to his life and work. Gibson 2003 presents itself both as an introduction to Fanon’s work and also as an argument for his continuing relevance as a major humanistic thinker whose texts ask to be put to work in the name of social justice. Nayar 2013 is part of a series of texts devoted to critical thinkers; it focuses on a number of key issues in Fanon’s body of work, as well as some of the critical approaches to his work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Bhabha 1986 and Bhabha 2004 provide introductions to Fanon’s two most important books: the former is a foreword to a new edition of Black Skin, White Masks, which has had a great influence on subsequent readings of Fanon’s first book; the latter is a foreword to Richard Philcox’s new translation of The Wretched of the Earth. Finally, the most recent text here, Gordon 2015, provides a philosophical introduction to Fanon’s life and thought.
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  7. Bhabha, Homi. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition.” In Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Foreword to Frantz Fanon, xxi–xxxvii. London: Pluto, 1986.
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  11. Designed to introduce Fanon’s first book, which was reissued in 1986 (after going out of print), for a new British edition of the text. Bhabha’s extended reading of Fanon’s text emphasizes the psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and disjunctive aspects of Fanon’s thought, while playing down the Marxist and existentialist strands. This text has proven to be one of the most influential (and most controversial) of the readings of Fanon’s work undertaken since the 1980s.
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  15. Bhabha, Homi. “Framing Fanon.” In The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Foreword to Frantz Fanon, vii–xlii. New York: Grove, 2004.
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  19. Both an introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and a long meditation on the relevance of Fanon’s book to the 21st century. It includes an important reading of the psychoanalytic themes in Fanon’s late work, as well as discussing the continuing relevance of Fanon in the contemporary context. It is also marked by Bhabha’s strong division between Fanon’s early and late work, a theme to which he returns throughout his work on Fanon.
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  23. Gendzier, Irene. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Grove, 1973.
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  27. One of the first book-length studies of Fanon’s work, Gendzier’s book functions both as a biography of Fanon, and as a close study of his work. As a historian of the modern Middle East, Gendzier is well positioned to place Fanon’s work in its historical and political context, making this one of the first important studies of his work.
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  31. Gibson, Nigel. Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. New York: Polity, 2003.
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  35. Both an introduction to Fanon’s work and also an argument for his continuing relevance as a major humanistic thinker. Gibson works through a series of themes in Fanon’s work by arranging them roughly biographically—from Fanon’s engagements with the racial gaze, to his struggle with négritude, to his growing commitment to the Algerian Revolution—ending with Fanon’s theory of national consciousness and his positing of a new humanism in his final work.
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  39. Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995.
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  43. One of the first and most important studies of Fanon as a philosopher, placing him within the tradition of existential phenomenology. Gordon’s engagement with Fanon alongside G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other phenomenologists is motivated by his belief that “Fanon was a great philosopher and that his ideas continue to be of great value to other philosophers, cultural critics, human scientists, and laypeople alike” (p. 2).
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  47. Gordon, Lewis R. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
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  51. Gordon, one of the most influential readers of Fanon’s work, returns to his texts (working with his own translations of Fanon’s original writings) in order to present Fanon as an exemplar of “living thought” and a powerful voice against the philosophical bases of antiblack racism.
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  55. Hansen, Emmanuel. Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.
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  59. An early attempt to read Fanon’s oeuvre as a totality, Hansen’s book was published at a time when Fanon’s work was viewed as belonging to a decade that had been left behind, as well as to decolonization struggles that had ended in failure. Against this current, he argues for the continuing importance of Fanon’s work, from the perspectives of political philosophy, social science, ideology, and mythmaking.
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  63. Nayar, Pramod K. Frantz Fanon. New York: Routledge, 2013.
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  67. Nayar’s book is part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series and thus is intended to be an introduction to and overview of Fanon’s work. It works through a number of important themes in Fanon’s work, including long analyses of Fanon’s views on violence, nationalism, and humanism. It ends with an overview of some of the critical work published on Fanon since his death.
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  71. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
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  75. An ambitious, closely argued, and often polemical study. Sekyi-Otu declares his intention to read Fanon’s body of work dialectically, as an interconnected oeuvre. This means valorizing Fanon’s later work, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, as holding the key to Fanon’s thought; in the process, he produces remarkably creative close readings of all Fanon’s texts and defends Fanon from his harshest critics.
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  79. Taylor, Patrick. The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
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  83. While not immediately obvious from its title, Taylor’s book, which he presents as a study of “the experience of the Afro-Caribbean community” (p. xiii), is in fact a book-length study of Fanon’s work as it applies to the Afro-Caribbean political and cultural context. Taylor analyzes the ways that Fanon presents what he calls the “drama of colonialism” as well as a narrative of liberation, and ends with a final chapter on Fanon’s work alongside the Caribbean writers George Lamming and Derek Walcott.
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  87. Wyrick, Deborah. Fanon for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 1998.
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  91. Published as part of a “for beginners” series that includes books on a number of important theorists and philosophers, the illustrated comic book format of Wyrick’s book should not put off “serious” readers, since it provides a concise and excellent introduction to Fanon’s work. Includes sections on each of his books and a final section addressing Fanon’s continuing influence. An excellent starting point for readers who are encountering Fanon’s work for the first time.
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  95. Primary Texts
  96. As the Introduction notes, Fanon completed three books during his lifetime: Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), first translated into English as Black Skin, White Masks in 1967 (see Fanon 2008); L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959), first translated into English as A Dying Colonialism in 1965 (see Fanon 1965); and Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), first translated as The Wretched of the Earth in 1963 (see Fanon 2004). Fanon also wrote many occasional pieces, in particular during his time as one of the editors of El Moudjahid; these essays were published posthumously as Pour la révolution africaine: Écrits politiques (1969), and translated as Towards the African Revolution (see Fanon 1988). Two things should be noted about Fanon’s body of work. The first is that much of the critical attention paid to his work has been posthumous. Peau noire, masques blancs received little fanfare when it was published in 1952, and it soon went out of print; L’an V de la révolution algérienne received some attention from a younger generation of French readers disillusioned by the war in Algeria, but it was soon seized by the authorities in France, as was Les damnés de la terre, which appeared only days before Fanon’s death. A related point is the fact that the translation of Fanon’s work into English played a role in its subsequent influence: in particular, the American edition of The Wretched of the Earth (1965) became hugely influential among readers in the United States in the 1960s, and the republication of Black Skin, White Masks in 1986, with an introduction by Homi K. Bhabha, played a large role in the increasing attention given to that book by both English and French readers. One final note: there also exists a significant body of Fanon’s writing for medical journals, mostly cowritten articles on the theory and practice of psychiatry. These have not been included here, as they are not accessible to the general reader but await the attention of a careful editor.
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  98. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965.
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  102. English translation of L’An V de la revolution algérienne, 1959. Fanon’s second book is a sociological study of the Algerian Revolution. It includes chapters on the role of women in the revolution, changes in the structure of the Algerian family, and the role of radio broadcasts in the revolution. The chapter “Algeria Unveiled” has been one of Fanon’s most widely analyzed texts, especially among those interested in feminist approaches to his work.
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  106. Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1988.
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  110. English translation of Pour la revolution africaine: Écrits politiques, 1969. Fanon’s publisher brought out this collection eight years after Fanon’s death. It includes twenty articles written for El Moudjahid between 1957 and 1960, two early essays, his speech at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in 1956, and a diary that Fanon kept during a mission to Mali in 1960. It provides an indispensable account of Fanon’s intellectual and political development.
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  114. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Foreword by Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Grove, 2004.
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  118. English translation of Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961. Fanon’s final book, published shortly before his death, narrates the struggle for decolonization. While it begins with a seeming call to violence, the narrative becomes more complicated, moving through an analysis of national consciousness, national culture, and the mental disorders caused by colonial war. The book ends with a call to a new humanism, declaring: “we must make a new start” (p. 239).
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  122. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah. New York: Grove, 2008.
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  126. English translation of Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952. Fanon’s first book is a study of “the massive pschyo-existential complex” that is racism, and an attempt to “destroy” it (p. xvi). Drawing on existentialism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, medicine, and personal experience, it attempts to describe, analyze, and overcome the lived experience of racism. At its center is the chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” a searing account of the traumatic development of racial identities.
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  130. Biographies
  131. A number of biographies of Frantz Fanon were published in English within a decade of his death. Of these, only Gendzier 1973 (cited under General Overviews) remains a valuable biographical and critical source; the other early biographies are largely of historical interest. Caute 1970, a relatively short biographical account, and Geismar 1971, the first biography to contain detailed information about Fanon’s life, have been superseded by more recent biographical work and are more interesting as documents of how Fanon was read and perceived by English-language readers in the decade following his death. Without question, Macey 2012 is the authoritative and definitive biography of Fanon and is required reading for any student of his work. Of the more personal biographical accounts, de Beauvoir 1965 provides a vivid contemporary glimpse of Fanon just a few months before his death; Cherki 2006 gives an account of working closely alongside Fanon at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria; and Fanon 2014 is a moving narrative of Fanon’s early years and later development, written by Frantz Fanon’s elder brother Joby. Finally, Memmi 1973 provides an interesting critical analysis of what Memmi sees as Fanon’s “impossible” commitment to Algeria rather than to his home country of Martinique.
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  133. de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1965.
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  137. English translation of La Force des Choses, 1963. Beauvoir’s extraordinary postwar memoir contains a short section detailing Fanon’s visit to Rome to meet with Sartre, who was writing the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, in the summer of 1961. It remains one of the most vivid contemporary portraits of Fanon, only a few months before his untimely death: “When one was with him,” Beauvoir wrote, “life seemed to be a tragic adventure, often horrible, but of infinite worth” (p. 597).
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  141. Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking, 1970.
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  145. A relatively short biographical sketch, published as part of the Fontana Modern Masters series and written by a well-known British intellectual historian, novelist, and playwright. As the first full-length biography of Fanon in English, it is now of more interest as a historical artifact than as a research tool, but Caute’s idiosyncratic reading of Fanon’s work, grounded in his own interest in Marxism and theories of revolution, remains interesting and engaging.
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  149. Cherki, Alice. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Translated by Nadia Benabid. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
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  153. English translation of Frantz Fanon: Portrait, 2000. Cherki, today a practicing psychoanalyst in Paris, was from 1955 to 1961 a colleague of Fanon’s at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. Having had the opportunity to work closely with Fanon during his Algerian years, she is uniquely positioned to write about his life and work during that era; while she delves into Fanon’s life before his arrival in Algeria, it is his commitment to both his psychiatric work and to the cause of Algeria that is the true subject of this book.
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  157. Fanon, Joby. Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary. Translated by Daniel Nethery. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014.
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  161. English translation of Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique, 2004. This is an account of Fanon’s life written by his elder brother Joby and published only a few months before the author’s death at the age of eighty-one, in 2004. It provides an especially strong and moving portrait of Fanon’s early life in Martinique, as well as revealing glimpses of the household and environment that helped to shape the young Fanon. (Joby Fanon is interviewed extensively in Isaac Julien’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask; see Julien 1996, cited under Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies.)
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  165. Geismar, Peter. Frantz Fanon. New York: Dial, 1971.
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  169. The first extended biography of Fanon, written by a young American historian who, like Fanon, suffered an untimely death (at the age of thirty-one, shortly after publication of this book). It provided a then-unprecedented level of biographical detail, especially regarding Fanon’s time in France, and although the biographical information it provides has been superseded by the superior research in Macey 2012 and the readings of Fanon’s texts are not as sophisticated as those in Gendzier 1973 (cited under General Overviews), it remains an engaging and readable account.
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  173. Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. New York: Verso, 2012.
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  177. Macey’s book is without question the definitive and authoritative biography of Fanon. The result of decades of research by an intellectual historian and biographer who has also written an acclaimed biography of Michel Foucault, Macey’s book not only provides a wealth of information about Fanon’s life but also an informed and original reading of his work, with particular emphasis on how Fanon’s Martinican influences can be found in his later life and work.
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  181. Memmi, Albert. “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon.” Translated by Thomas Cassirer and G. Michael Twomey. The Massachusetts Review 14 (1973): 9–39.
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  185. English translation of “La Vie impossible de Frantz Fanon,” 1971. Memmi, a Tunisian writer whose book The Colonizer and the Colonized is often compared to Fanon’s work, takes a critical look at Fanon’s life and work. Taking a psychological approach, he suggests that because the politics of the Antilles did not allow Fanon to apply his revolutionary energies at home, his life involved the “impossible” goal of becoming Algerian in order to give himself to the revolution there.
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  189. Journal Special Issues
  190. The year 2011 marked two anniversaries: the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, and also the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s untimely death, both in December 1961. Four different publications published special issues keyed to these anniversaries, all of them approaching Fanon’s work from different methodological and political directions, with two further special issues following in 2012 and 2013. Taken together, these publications provide an excellent overview of contemporary scholarship on Fanon’s life and work (three of them are fully available online). Bell 2010 and Drabinski 2011 both focus specifically on The Wretched of the Earth; Young 2011 and the special issue of Pambazuka News examine the range of Fanon’s life and work in a contemporary context. Delas, et al. 2012 provides a cluster of three articles devoted to a reading of Fanon’s body of work, and calls attention to the renewed attention being given to Fanon’s work in France over the past decade. Finally, Farred 2013 features a rich and wide-ranging selection of thirteen essays dedicated to the continuing and urgent contribution that Fanon’s work can make in our contemporary political and cultural context. Also included here is an earlier special issue, Khalfa 2005, intended to mark the eightieth anniversary of Fanon’s birth, which includes both new work and also reprints of key documents, such as a page from Fanon’s diary.
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  192. Bell, Vikki, ed. Special Issue: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth 50 Years On. Theory, Culture, and Society 27.7–8 (2010).
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  196. This special issue takes a largely sociological approach to reading The Wretched of the Earth fifty years after its publication. Framed by an introductory essay by Bell, who provides an argument for the continuing relevance of Fanon’s late work. Includes Paul Gilroy’s article bringing together Fanon’s work with that of Jean Améry, together with contributions by established Fanon scholars, including David Macey, Azzedine Haddour, and Françoise Vergès.
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  200. Delas, Daniel, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Elsa Geneste. “A propos des œuvres de Frantz Fanon.” Études littéraires africaines 33 (2012): 81–99.
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  202. DOI: 10.7202/1018686arSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
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  204. This recent issue of Études littéraires africaines features a cluster of three articles devoted to reading Fanon’s body of work: Daniel Delas’s introductory piece, which reads Fanon’s style of writing; Pierre-Philippe Fraiture’s essay on Fanon and Sartre; and Elsa Geneste’s reading of Fanon’s “paradoxical antiracism” through his work both as a writer and as a psychiatrist. All three pieces call attention to the renewed attention Fanon’s work has received in France in the early 21st century.
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  208. Drabinski, John E., ed. Special Issue: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Fifty Years Later. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19.1 (2011).
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  212. This special issue, edited by Drabinski (whose moving memorial to the late Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Glissant, a contemporary of Fanon, frames the issue), focuses specifically on philosophical readings of Fanon’s late work, specifically The Wretched of the Earth. Contributors focus in particular on Fanon’s engagement with national culture and humanism, in the context of contemporary political struggles in South Africa and the uprisings of the Arab Spring; the issue is capped by Lewis Gordon’s essay “Living Fanon.”
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  216. Farred, Grant, ed. Special Issue: Fanon: Imperative of the Now. South Atlantic Quarterly 112.1 (2013).
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  218. DOI: 10.1215/00382876-1900549Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
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  220. This features an impressive selection of essays by both established Fanon scholars (including Nigel Gibson, Richard Pithouse, and John E. Drabinski), as well as younger scholars grounded in approaches drawn from cultural theory. Individual contributions put Fanon into dialogue with thinkers such as Hegel, Jacques Derrida, and Marx, and draw on contemporary political contexts in Palestine, India, and the Americas.
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  224. Khalfa, Jean, ed. Special Issue: Frantz Fanon (1926–1961): Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of his Birth. Wasafiri 44 (2005).
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  228. The earliest of these special issues, this one keyed to the eightieth anniversary of his birth in 2005. It contains a number of interesting analyses of Fanon’s work, including Bryan Cheyette’s reading of Fanon’s work alongside Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on anti-Semitism, as well as an interview with Claude Lanzmann, the French filmmaker who introduced Fanon to Sartre, and a translated essay by Jean Améry on Fanon’s concept of violence and his commitment to humanism (see Améry 2005, cited under Theories of Violence).
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  232. Special Issue: Fifty Years On: Frantz Fanon Lives. Pambazuka News 561 (December 2011).
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  236. The contributions focus on the relevance of Fanon’s work to the current political context in Africa; it includes Ama Biney’s overview, Bill Fletcher’s analysis of Fanon’s work as it relates to workers’ struggles in Africa, Aziz Salmone Fall on Fanon and Pan-Africanism, and a piece on Fanon and contemporary politics by Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, Fanon’s daughter, a writer and human rights activist.
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  240. Young, Kurt B., ed. Special Issue: Veneration and Struggle: Commemorating Frantz Fanon. Journal of Pan African Studies 4.7 (2011).
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  243.  
  244. While this is a special issue of a journal dedicated specifically to pan-African studies, and several of the pieces are specifically grounded in this topic (including a piece by Kurt B. Young, who edited the issue), the contributions cover a wide range of issues, including questions of Fanon’s work as a form of praxis and several considerations of Fanon’s literary practices, including Paulette Richards’ thoughtful analysis of Fanon as a reader of African American folklore.
  245.  
  246. Find this resource:
  247.  
  248. Reception Studies and Fanon Studies
  249. The reception of Fanon’s work has been largely posthumous, since his major texts were either ignored or unavailable during his lifetime (or published after his death). His texts have also inspired a variety of reactions and interpretations, as well as lively and sometimes contentious debates as to their meaning and relevance. One key point of contention has been the question of the relationship between Fanon’s “early” work (specifically Black Skin, White Masks) and his “late” work (specifically The Wretched of the Earth). Fanon’s readers during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those grounded in Marxism and anticolonial nationalism, including the Black Power movement in the United States, tended to focus almost exclusively upon his late work; beginning in the 1980s, critics grounded in postcolonial, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches began to argue for the relevance of Black Skin, White Masks, sometimes at the expense of his later work (other readers, such as Alessandrini 1999, cited under Collections of Essays, reject the very split between “early” and “late” Fanon). All of the texts included here are important additions to the developing field of Fanon studies and take as their focus not only Fanon’s writings themselves but also the subsequent reception of his texts. Zolberg and Zolberg 1967 is an important early text that describes Fanon’s reception in the United States, both among the Black Power movement and within what was then called “the New Left” more generally. Gates 1991 is an influential account of the development of postcolonial and cultural studies readings of Fanon in the 1980s; it provides a useful overview of emerging readings of Black Skin, White Masks. Robinson 1993 is in many ways a direct response to Gates and a renunciation of these more recent readings of Fanon’s work as “appropriations” by cultural studies academics attempting to depoliticize Fanon. Hall 1996 is a meditation by one of the founders of Black British cultural studies, emphasizing both the complexities and contradictions in Fanon’s body of work and the productiveness of different and even antithetical readings of his work. Frindéthié 1998 provides an appreciative but critical analysis of the dialectical readings of Fanon’s work performed by Patrick Taylor and Ato Sekyi-Otu (see Taylor 1989 and Sekyi-Otu 1996, both cited under General Overviews). Lazarus 1993 and Gibson 1999 both criticize certain approaches to Fanon’s early work within cultural studies and emphasize the importance of the engagements with humanism and national consciousness in Fanon’s late work. Gilroy 2001 and Gilroy 2005 represent an evolving reading of Fanon’s work by one of the major contemporary theorists of the African diaspora. Finally, Rabaka 2010 shares something of the goal of Robinson 1993, in that the intent is to move past previous readings of Fanon’s work in order to return to the “true” Fanon.
  250.  
  251. Frindéthié, K. M. “Tracing a Theoretical Gesture: Patrick Taylor and Ato Sekyi-Otu Reading Fanon.” Research in African Literatures 29.3 (1998): 162–170.
  252.  
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  254.  
  255. A close reading (and ultimately a critique) of Taylor 1989 and Sekyi-Otu 1996 (cited under General Overviews), focusing specifically on what Frindéthié sees as their shared belief in a “dialectic of intentionality” (p. 163). Against their readings, he draws on the performative theory of J. L. Austin to emphasize the ways in which Fanon’s theory homogenizes certain forms of difference, a point that Frindéthié sees as downplayed by Taylor and Sekyi-Otu in their more optimistic readings of Fanon.
  256.  
  257. Find this resource:
  258.  
  259. Gates, Henry Louis. “Critical Fanonism.” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (1991): 457–470.
  260.  
  261. DOI: 10.1086/448592Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  262.  
  263. A crucial text in the development of what has come to be called “Fanon studies.” Gates makes it clear that his goal in the essay is not to do a reading of Fanon’s work, but rather to do a reading of certain readings of Fanon, in order to ask why his work (and particularly Black Skin, White Masks) has proven such a point of “fascination” for contemporary critics’ writing on colonialism and racism. As such, it presents an excellent overview of prevalent readings of Fanon from the 1980s.
  264.  
  265. Find this resource:
  266.  
  267. Gibson, Nigel. “Thoughts About Doing Fanonism in the 1990s.” College Literature 26.2 (1999): 96–117.
  268.  
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  270.  
  271. Gibson offers a polemic against much of the critical work on Fanon in the 1980s and 1990s (including work outlined in Gates 1991), particularly work grounded in cultural studies. Against what Gibson sees as the political pessimism in this cultural studies work, he proposes to “use Fanon to polemicize against invented ‘Fanons’” (p. 96) to return to the directly political nature of Fanon’s writings.
  272.  
  273. Find this resource:
  274.  
  275. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
  276.  
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  278.  
  279. Gilroy, the author of the influential 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, engages closely with Fanon’s work (alongside that of a number of other post–Second World War Black Atlantic thinkers). While he finds in Fanon’s work—especially in Black Skin, White Masks—crucial tools for the formation of antiracist thought and action today, he rejects certain strands of later work, specifically what he sees as the Manichean and “militarized” thinking expressed in The Wretched of the Earth.
  280.  
  281. Find this resource:
  282.  
  283. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
  284.  
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  286.  
  287. Gilroy’s subsequent book, following Against Race, offers a fascinating reconsideration of Fanon’s work, in particular Fanon’s later work. While he still considers Black Skin, White Masks to be a key text for contemporary antiracism, Gilroy returns to The Wretched of the Earth in order to emphasize Fanon’s engagement with humanism and his call to rehumanize both the colonizer and the colonizer, which provides an inspiration for Gilroy’s own formulation of what he calls “planetary humanism.”
  288.  
  289. Find this resource:
  290.  
  291. Hall, Stuart. “The After-life of Frantz Fanon.” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read, 12–37. Seattle, WA: Bay, 1996.
  292.  
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  294.  
  295. Hall, one of the founders of Black British cultural studies, begins by asking why, after years of relative neglect, Fanon is “once again beginning to excite such intense intellectual debate and controversy” (p. 12). Surveying work published on Fanon in the 1980s and 1990s, Hall concludes that our challenge is to engage what he calls “the after-life” of Fanon’s life and work.
  296.  
  297. Find this resource:
  298.  
  299. Lazarus, Neil. “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Research in African Literatures 24.4 (1993): 69–98.
  300.  
  301. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  302.  
  303. Lazarus notes that the return to Fanon’s work by postcolonial theorists has coincided with a rejection of the idea that nationalism can have a liberatory potential. Against this position, Lazarus reads Fanon’s notion of “national consciousness” as offering resistance both to colonialism and to traditional nationalism. He also refutes Christopher Miller’s critique of Fanon (see Miller 1990, cited under African Revolution).
  304.  
  305. Find this resource:
  306.  
  307. Rabaka, Reiland. Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010.
  308.  
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  310.  
  311. Rabaka’s book returns to Fanon’s work after surveying a variety of previous approaches. Positing five “forms of Fanonism”—antiracist Fanonism, decolonialist Fanonism, Marxist Fanonism, feminist Fanonism, and revolutionary humanist Fanonism—Rabaka proposes to place Fanon within what he describes as the Africana tradition of critical theory, in order to restore a more authentic reading of his work, which he sees as lost in many strands of Fanon studies.
  312.  
  313. Find this resource:
  314.  
  315. Robinson, Cedric. “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon.” Race and Class 35 (1993): 79–91.
  316.  
  317. DOI: 10.1177/030639689303500108Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  318.  
  319. Like Gates 1991, this is an absolutely crucial piece for the development of Fanon studies, although the position it takes up is diametrically opposed to that of Gates. Robinson decries academic work that he sees as depoliticizing and, in effect, erasing Fanon; he divides recent readers of Fanon into those working in “the Fanonian tradition” versus those such as Gates and Homi K. Bhabha, who he declares to be “anti-Fanonists.”
  320.  
  321. Find this resource:
  322.  
  323. Zolberg, Aristide R., and Vera B. Zolberg. “The Americanization of Frantz Fanon.” Public Interest 9 (1967).
  324.  
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  326.  
  327. An important early work on the influence of Fanon in the United States that provides an overview of how his work had come to be read and used in the years since Fanon’s death. The authors discuss Fanon’s adaptation by the Black Power movement and by intellectuals and activists belonging to the New Left (but also by more mainstream intellectuals), and compare the contemporary influence of The Wretched of the Earth to that of Machiavelli’s The Prince in its day.
  328.  
  329. Find this resource:
  330.  
  331. Collections of Essays
  332. While all of these texts are of interest to readers of Fanon, each collection takes a particular approach to his work. Gordon, et al. 1996 represents an important and wide-ranging set of overviews of Fanon’s work, and the editors’ introduction effectively grounds the essays included in the context of earlier scholarship on Fanon. Published in the same year, Read 1996 is a different but equally significant, book; it focuses on Fanon’s work specifically in the context of visual culture. Alessandrini 1999 is another overview of critical approaches to Fanon, largely within the context of cultural studies: it includes an extended bibliography of secondary work on Fanon and an introduction that discusses previous work in Fanon studies. Gibson 1999 features an extended introduction to Fanon’s life and work and includes essays published over several decades, as well as new work; Gibson 2011, by the same editor, extends his previous book, with new essays responding to some of the critical readings of Fanon from the intervening decade. Haddour 2005, intended as a “reader” to introduce newcomers to Fanon’s work, contains extracts from Fanon’s four books, together with a contextualizing introduction by the editor. Silverman 2006 is the only collection dedicated specifically to Black Skin, White Masks, and contains particularly strong analyses of Fanon’s Martinican context. The two most recent collections are more specialized in their focus: Dei and Simmons 2010 examines the pedagogical possibilities presented by Fanon’s work, while Hoppe and Nicholls 2010 applies Fanon’s work to a wide range of philosophical issues, including the decolonization of the discipline of philosophy itself.
  333.  
  334. Alessandrini, Anthony C., ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  335.  
  336. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  337.  
  338. This collection provides a solid overview of Fanon’s work, with an introduction that reviews some of the developments of Fanon studies since the 1960s and an extended bibliography of secondary work. The contributors are particularly focused upon the relationship between Fanon’s work and cultural studies; in a section of the book entitled “Fanon and/as Cultural Studies,” contributors both discuss Fanon’s work as a form of cultural studies and suggest ways that his work challenges current paradigms in the field.
  339.  
  340. Find this resource:
  341.  
  342. Dei, George Jerry Sefa, and Marlon Simmons, eds. Fanon and Education: Thinking Through Pedagogical Possibilities. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
  343.  
  344. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  345.  
  346. This collection reads Fanon’s work as a way to begin to imagine alternative forms of pedagogy and educational techniques. Individual essays, rather than functioning as close readings of Fanon’s work, use his work as a jumping-off point for an investigation of educational practices in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean.
  347.  
  348. Find this resource:
  349.  
  350. Gibson, Nigel, ed. Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue. New York: Humanity, 1999.
  351.  
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  353.  
  354. A key collection, which reprints a number of important essays by earlier scholars of Fanon’s work, including Emmanuel Hansen, Lou Turner, and Hussein Bulhan, but also an array of new pieces addressing Fanon’s contemporary relevance. Gibson also includes a long introduction to Fanon’s life and work, with a wealth of biographical information.
  355.  
  356. Find this resource:
  357.  
  358. Gibson, Nigel, ed. Living Fanon: Global Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
  359.  
  360. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  361.  
  362. The contributors to this volume (which includes work by a number of established Fanon scholars) focus on how Fanon’s work continues to speak to contemporary politics and culture. Since it comes after several decades of intensive work on Fanon, this collection also features a critical assessment of more recent analyses of Fanon’s work by Fanon studies scholars.
  363.  
  364. Find this resource:
  365.  
  366. Gordon, Lewis R., T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White, eds. Fanon: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
  367.  
  368. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  369.  
  370. One of the first and most significant collections of critical writing on Fanon’s life and work. The editors, in their introduction, set out what they see as the five stages that have made up the field of Fanon studies from the 1960s to the 1990s, including initial applications, biographical work, work grounded in political theory, postmodern and postcolonial approaches, as well as a fifth stage, which this collection helps to inaugurate. The essays included in the volume are particularly strong in approaches drawn from philosophy and political theory.
  371.  
  372. Find this resource:
  373.  
  374. Haddour, Azzedine, ed. The Fanon Reader. London: Pluto, 2005.
  375.  
  376. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  377.  
  378. Contains a series of excerpts from Fanon’s four books (including the posthumous Towards the African Revolution), divided thematically into three categories: “Culture and Racism,” “Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” and “On Negritude and National Culture.” The editor provides an introduction that places Fanon within the context of postcolonial studies.
  379.  
  380. Find this resource:
  381.  
  382. Hoppe, Elizabeth A., and Tracey Nicholls, eds. Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010.
  383.  
  384. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  385.  
  386. This collection engages with Fanon’s work, not just to make the argument that his work continues to be philosophically relevant but also to bring this work to bear on a number of questions in philosophy, particularly those related to racism, colonialism, and gender politics. Several contributors also find in Fanon’s work tools for decolonizing the discipline of philosophy itself.
  387.  
  388. Find this resource:
  389.  
  390. Read, Alan, ed. The Fact of Blackness. Seattle, WA: Bay, 1996.
  391.  
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  393.  
  394. This collection, which has proved extremely influential among readers of Fanon in the field of cultural studies, originated from a symposium at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1995; several of the roundtable discussions between artists, filmmakers, and theorists are reproduced verbatim in the book. It also includes original essays by major figures in Fanon studies such as Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and Kobena Mercer.
  395.  
  396. Find this resource:
  397.  
  398. Silverman, Max, ed. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006.
  399.  
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  401.  
  402. This is the first collection dedicated specifically to Fanon’s first book. It provides a good introduction to the book, as well as in-depth looks at particular themes from Fanon’s early work, including those related to his Martinican context, his relationship to existentialism and psychoanalysis, and the links between racism and anti-Semitism drawn by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks.
  403.  
  404. Find this resource:
  405.  
  406. Comparative Work
  407. The texts listed in this section represent only a small fraction of the comparative work that has been done on Fanon; the pieces chosen here represent particularly fine examples of this work and also point to certain themes and strands within the larger body of comparative work. For example, Young 2001 brings Fanon together with the Guinea-Bissaun writer and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral to think about decolonization in Africa from a historical perspective (for another comparison of Fanon and Cabral, see Blackey 1974, cited under African Revolution). Several pieces place Fanon within his contemporary milieu alongside other major thinkers: Julien 2000 locates Fanon alongside Aimé Césaire and Richard Wright, as anticolonial intellectuals meeting each other within the colonial metropolis of Paris; Wilder 2004 similarly brings Fanon and Césaire together, around the question of “emancipation” in the post-slavery (but not yet postcolonial) Francophone context; and Alessandrini 2009 puts Fanon’s work in dialogue with that of Fanon’s contemporary Michel Foucault, even though they are often viewed as antithetical thinkers. Other pieces here consider Fanon’s influence upon radical intellectuals who engaged with his work: Mardorossian 2009 analyzes Fanon’s influence on his fellow Martinican writer Edouard Glissant; Dayan-Herzbrun 2011 considers the role played by Fanon’s work in the development of Edward Said’s thinking; and Davari 2014 thinks through the influence of Fanon upon the Iranian revolutionary thinker ‘Ali Shari’ati, who translated Fanon’s work into Persian. Finally, one strand of comparative work represented here uses Fanon’s work as a way to reread the work of older, canonical writers and texts: Posnock 1997 reads Fanon together with W. E. B. DuBois’s work on the role of the black intellectual; Frazer and Hutchings 2008 uses Hannah Arendt’s engagement with Fanon’s theory of violence (see Arendt 1969, cited under Theories of Violence) as an invitation to rethink each author’s work alongside that of the other; and Gordon 2014 performs what she describes as a “creolization” of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by reading this work through a framework provided by Fanon’s thought.
  408.  
  409. Alessandrini, Anthony C. “The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects.” Foucault Studies 7 (2009).
  410.  
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  412.  
  413. Begins from the premise that Fanon and Foucault are usually set against each other within postcolonial studies: the former as a proponent of humanism, the latter as a prominent theorist of antihumanism. Alessandrini instead proposes to read them together, both to challenge the idea that they have antithetical positions toward humanism and also to claim that what links these two theorists is more important than what separates them.
  414.  
  415. Find this resource:
  416.  
  417. Davari, Arash. “A Return to Which Self?: ‘Ali Shari’ati and Frantz Fanon on the Political Ethics of Insurrectionary Violence.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34.1 (2014): 86–105.
  418.  
  419. DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-2648587Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  420.  
  421. An important piece that offers a fascinating reading of Fanon’s theories of violence in the context of the Iranian Revolution. Davari brings the work of Fanon together with that of the Iranian writer and revolutionary ‘Ali Shari’ati. He also analyzes how Shari’ati’s Persian translation of The Wretched of the Earth indicates some of the ways that Shari’ati’s theory of revolutionary ethics, and his subsequent involvement in the Iranian Revolution, was influenced by his reading of Fanon.
  422.  
  423. Find this resource:
  424.  
  425. Dayan-Herzbrun, Sonia. “De Frantz Fanon à Edward Said: L’impensé colonial.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19 (2011).
  426.  
  427. DOI: 10.5195/jffp.2011.479Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  428.  
  429. Dayan-Herzbrun argues that in France, Fanon’s work is read through the framework provided by Jean-Paul Sartre. She proposes instead to understand Fanon’s work through the engagements that Edward Said makes with Fanon throughout his body of work, in part to encourage a closer attention to questions of colonialism and postcolonialism within contemporary French thought more generally.
  430.  
  431. Find this resource:
  432.  
  433. Frazer, Elizabeth, and Kimberly Hutchings. “On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon.” Contemporary Political Theory 7 (2008): 90–108.
  434.  
  435. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300328Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  436.  
  437. Hannah Arendt, in her reading of Fanon’s work, offered a harsh critique of his notion of violence (see Arendt 1969, cited under Theories of Violence), although arguably her target was more Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth than Fanon’s book itself. In their fine reading of this debate, Frazer and Hutchings review their respective writings on violence and argue that read together, Fanon and Arendt simultaneously reveal the limitations of each other’s arguments on politics and violence and supplement each other.
  438.  
  439. Find this resource:
  440.  
  441. Gordon, Jane Anna. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
  442.  
  443. DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823254811.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  444.  
  445. Gordon proposes to reevaluate two of the major themes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy—the emancipatory potential of human inquiry and the power of the general will—by re-reading his work through concepts drawn from the work of Fanon. She describes this reading of the two together as “a creolization of one canonical figure through the ideas of another” (p. 2).
  446.  
  447. Find this resource:
  448.  
  449. Julien, Eileen. “Terrains de Rencontre: Césaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decolonization.” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 149–166.
  450.  
  451. DOI: 10.2307/2903233Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  452.  
  453. Noting that three great writers on race and colonialism—Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, and Frantz Fanon—were all present at the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, Julien uses this as an occasion to read their work together, within the larger phenomenon of anticolonial African diaspora intellectuals who encountered each other in metropolitan colonial center such as Paris and London.
  454.  
  455. Find this resource:
  456.  
  457. Mardorossian, Carine. “From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy.” Small Axe 30 (2009): 12–24.
  458.  
  459. DOI: 10.1215/07990537-2009-023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  460.  
  461. One of the best available articles in English for understanding Fanon in a specifically Martinican context. Mardorossian notes that Fanon is one of the few Francophone intellectuals whose work is included in Anglo-American postcolonial studies, but this inclusion has sometimes been at the cost of losing Fanon’s larger Francophone Caribbean context. By tracing Fanon’s influence on the work of the Martinican poet and theorist Edouard Glissant, she proposes to restore some sense of this lost context.
  462.  
  463. Find this resource:
  464.  
  465. Posnock, Ross. “How It Feels to Be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the ‘Impossible Life’ of the Black Intellectual.” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 323–349.
  466.  
  467. DOI: 10.1086/448831Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  468.  
  469. Posnock’s intention in bringing together Fanon’s work with that of W. E. B. DuBois is not only to trace the genealogy of certain models of the black intellectual but also to argue that the two writers share an approach that he describes as simultaneously “against origins and starting from them” (p. 325), which he sees as similar to the approach taken by contemporary theorists of cosmopolitanism.
  470.  
  471. Find this resource:
  472.  
  473. Wilder, Gary. “Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation.” Radical History Review 90 (2004): 31–61.
  474.  
  475. DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2004-90-31Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  476.  
  477. Wilder, who has written widely on the négritude movement, here brings Fanon together with his teacher and mentor Aimé Césaire, specifically in terms of how they struggle with the legacy of “emancipation” (which Wilder argues is different from “freedom”) in the postslavery context, and also how each writer moves past a particular “impasse” in their work and toward an emancipatory form of humanism.
  478.  
  479. Find this resource:
  480.  
  481. Young, Robert J. C. “Africa IV: Fanon/Cabral.” In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. By Robert J. C. Young, 274–292. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
  482.  
  483. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  484.  
  485. Young brings Fanon together with the Guinea-Bissaun revolutionary Amilcar Cabral to examine their respective theories of revolution. However, whereas in the 1970s this represented a contemporary question for African political movements, Young is more interested in their work within a historical context and in how a reading of their texts might contribute to an understanding of the postcolonial African political realities of the 21st century.
  486.  
  487. Find this resource:
  488.  
  489. Theories of Violence
  490. Without question, one of the most striking, enduring, and controversial themes in the work of Fanon is that of violence. All of the major works cited throughout this bibliography contain at least some discussion of what is often described as Fanon’s “theory of violence” (particularly in the chapter of The Wretched of the Earth entitled “On Violence”—this chapter has in fact sometimes been read as a separate text, apart from the rest of the book). The texts in this section take the question of violence as their central theme, sometimes to describe Fanon’s engagement with the idea of violence, sometimes to criticize it, and sometimes to offer a reassessment or reinterpretation. Arendt 1969 is fundamentally important for its highly influential contemporary critique of Fanon’s theory of violence; Améry 2005, first published in 1971, is a roughly contemporary account by a writer who shares many of Arendt’s concerns but comes to a different conclusion about Fanon on violence. Kawash 1999 provides an alternative understanding of Fanon’s thinking on violence, considering the penultimate chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” which calls into question some of the formulations found earlier in the book. Kebede 2001 examines the theme of “rehabilitation” in The Wretched of the Earth by considering the aftermath of anticolonial struggles in Africa. Butler 2008 revisits the question of violence and nonviolence in Fanon by reading Sartre’s “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth as his restating of Fanon’s theory of violence. Finally, Nesbitt 2012 features an innovative reading of the relationship between “inhuman” violence and the development of a new humanism as Fanon articulates it in The Wretched of the Earth.
  491.  
  492. Améry, Jean. “The Birth of Man from the Spirit of Violence: Frantz Fanon the Revolutionary.” Translated by Adrian Daub. Wasafiri 44 (2005): 13–18.
  493.  
  494. DOI: 10.1080/02690050508589945Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495.  
  496. First published in German in 1971. Améry, a philosopher and political activist, was a survivor of Auschwitz, an experience that became a major theme in his writings. Drawing on this experience, he describes his sense of kinship upon first reading Fanon; he was drawn to the important distinction between the dehumanizing violence of racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, and the paradoxically humanizing violence exercised by the victim against the victimizer in resisting.
  497.  
  498. Find this resource:
  499.  
  500. Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Violence.” New York Review of Books, 27 February 1969.
  501.  
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  503.  
  504. Arendt’s article, which was hugely influential when it was published, remains required reading for an understanding of one of the most important objections to Fanon’s theory of violence. Her polemic is aimed as much against Sartre and “New Left” thinkers; she insists that theories of violence too often confuse the power of violence with the power associated with what she calls doing politics, which is the necessary basis for truly liberating political movements.
  505.  
  506. Find this resource:
  507.  
  508. Butler, Judith. “Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon.” In Race after Sartre. Edited by Jonathan Judaken, 211–232. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
  509.  
  510. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511.  
  512. Butler’s article, by one of the most important contemporary philosophers and theorists writing in English, is also one of the closest readings of Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Butler, like Arendt 1969, argues that Sartre is a more straightforward and less nuanced advocate of violence than Fanon himself; her reading of both writers is in the service of rethinking what “violence” and “nonviolence” in political thought and action might mean today.
  513.  
  514. Find this resource:
  515.  
  516. Kawash, Samira. “Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization.” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 235–257. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  517.  
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519.  
  520. Kawash argues against readings (including Arendt 1969) that suggest Fanon forces us to take sides, for or against violence. Reading the first half of The Wretched of the Earth, which seems to be an argument for the humanizing nature of anticolonial violence, together with the book’s penultimate chapter, which shows the horrifying cost of this violence, she presents a nuanced understanding of Fanon’s engagement with colonial violence.
  521.  
  522. Find this resource:
  523.  
  524. Kebede, Messay. “The Rehabilitation of Violence and the Violence of Rehabilitation: Fanon and Colonialism.” Journal of Black Studies 31 (2001): 539–562.
  525.  
  526. DOI: 10.1177/002193470103100502Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527.  
  528. Kebede, a philosopher originally from Ethiopia, begins from the notion that Fanon’s theory of violence suggests that anticolonial violence provides a necessary form of “rehabilitation” for those who have been subjected to the dehumanizing violence of colonialism. He goes on to analyze the consistency of this idea in Fanon’s work and ultimately rejects it, arguing that far from offering a cure, violence is the disease itself that must be fought in postcolonial Africa.
  529.  
  530. Find this resource:
  531.  
  532. Nesbitt, Nick. “Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s ‘De la violence.’” International Journal of Francophone Studies 15.3–4 (2012): 395–413.
  533.  
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535.  
  536. Nesbitt reads the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence,” within a larger argument that Fanon espouses an anticolonial humanism that can only come about through the struggle for decolonization itself. Therefore, he argues, it is necessary to come to terms with the “inhumanism” of anticolonial violence as a necessary step to achieving this state of decolonization and the new humanism for which Fanon strove.
  537.  
  538. Find this resource:
  539.  
  540. The African Revolution
  541. Fanon’s deep and unsparing commitment to what he described as “the African Revolution” was a major theme in his later work, as is clear in the title of his posthumously published volume, Towards the African Revolution. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon provided his impressions of the emergence of a new society amidst the Algerian Revolution, but it was in The Wretched of the Earth that he fully articulated his theories regarding revolution in Africa, theories that would be deeply influential and, for many readers (especially Fanon’s early readers, and those reading him from a Marxist perspective), quite controversial. The texts in this section engage with Fanon’s theorization of the African Revolution. Several are examples of relatively early readings of his work. Armah 1969 provides the impressions and analysis of a writer deeply involved in the process of decolonization in Ghana (Lazarus 1990 focuses closely on Armah’s novels, and the influence of Fanon upon Armah’s writing); Beckett 1972 and Perinbaum 1973 consider Fanon’s writings on the African Revolution, particularly his theories about the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, as well as some of the critical responses to his theories; Blackey 1974 compares the visions for African revolution found in the work of Fanon and Amilcar Cabral; Wallerstein 1979 provides a thoughtful response to what he sees as the creation by some of Fanon’s readers of “Fanonism,” a simplified understanding of Fanon’s theories that inspired polemical responses and dismissals, and proposes a close reading of Fanon’s work to analyze contemporary class issues in Africa. Ngugi 1986, by an influential contemporary African writer, is in many ways a continuation of Fanon’s work on the decolonization of culture in Africa. Miller 1990, by contrast, is among the harshest critiques of Fanon, attacking what Miller sees as Fanon’s refusal to engage with precolonial African history and culture. Mowitt 1992 provides an analysis of Fanon’s emerging understanding of national culture in Algeria, and his own commitment to the Algerian Revolution, which led him in his later writing to refer to “we Algerians.” Finally, Sharawy 2011 applies Fanon’s work to contemporary political struggles in Africa, including those being carried on in the wake of globalization.
  542.  
  543. Armah, Ayi Kwei. “Fanon: The Awakener.” Negro Digest 18 (October 1969): 4–9.
  544.  
  545. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  546.  
  547. Armah is a major Ghanaian novelist, best known for his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, an account of the struggles to enter the postcolonial era. In this article, he intersperses his own prose with quotes from Fanon’s work, arguing that Fanon’s commitment to the ongoing African Revolution also holds the key to struggles against racism in the United States and throughout the world.
  548.  
  549. Find this resource:
  550.  
  551. Beckett, Paul A. “Frantz Fanon and Sub-Saharan Africa: Notes on the Contemporary Significance of His Work.” Africa Today 19 (1972): 59–72.
  552.  
  553. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  554.  
  555. An interesting and important account from the first generation of Fanon studies. Beckett begins by noting that Fanon’s work had become much more influential in Europe and North American than in Africa, even though the latter was arguably the audience Fanon intended to address. Working within a Marxist approach to class conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, Beckett analyzes the applicability of Fanon’s work to African politics, as well as the places where it might fail to be applicable.
  556.  
  557. Find this resource:
  558.  
  559. Blackey, Robert. “Fanon and Cabral: A Contrast in Theories of Revolution for Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 12 (1974): 191–209.
  560.  
  561. DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00009204Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  562.  
  563. An early reading of Fanon’s work, grounded in a strongly Marxist approach. The author brings together Fanon with Amilcar Cabral, the writer and revolutionary from Guinea-Bissau, not only to point out similarities and differences between the two (including the suggestion that Fanon functioned more as a revolutionary theorist and Cabral more as a party organizer) but also to argue that it was not possible to talk about “African revolutionary theory” as though it was a singular or homogenous entity.
  564.  
  565. Find this resource:
  566.  
  567. Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
  568.  
  569. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  570.  
  571. Lazarus’s book is a study of the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, whose work he sees as embodying cultural and political attempts to strive toward an African reality beyond colonialism. He focuses throughout upon Fanon’s influence on Armah’s work (see Armah 1969) and also uses Fanon’s work as a framework for reading Armah’s novels.
  572.  
  573. Find this resource:
  574.  
  575. Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
  576.  
  577. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  578.  
  579. One of the harshest critiques of Fanon’s work. Starting from the suggestion that Fanon declares that colonialism has destroyed all existing forms of traditional culture, Miller, an anthropologist, accuses him of simply refusing to take into account “local knowledge.” Citing what he sees as Fanon’s “massively ethnocentric” view of precolonial African history, he accuses him of the desire to simply “liquidate” this history in favor of his own postcolonial vision for Africa (pp. 49–50).
  580.  
  581. Find this resource:
  582.  
  583. Mowitt, John. “Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish.” Cultural Critique 22 (1992): 165–186.
  584.  
  585. DOI: 10.2307/1354087Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  586.  
  587. Mowitt focuses on the category of the nation as it is articulated in Fanon’s work, both as an intellectual and theoretical category, and in Fanon’s own specific engagement with the Algerian Revolution. Of particular importance is Fanon’s increasing tendency to identify himself within the category “we Algerians” in his late work.
  588.  
  589. Find this resource:
  590.  
  591. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986.
  592.  
  593. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  594.  
  595. Ngugi is among the most influential contemporary African intellectuals. This collection is devoted to what he calls “linguistic decolonization” in African thought. It is deeply influenced by Fanon—by his focus on language and racism in Black Skin, White Masks and on cultural decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth—and can be read as a continuation of the analysis of these topics begun by Fanon.
  596.  
  597. Find this resource:
  598.  
  599. Perinbaum, B. Marie. “Fanon and the Revolutionary Peasantry: The Algerian Case.” Journal of Modern African Studies 11 (1973): 427–445.
  600.  
  601. DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00008521Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  602.  
  603. Perinbaum focuses on one of the most controversial arguments of The Wretched of the Earth: in the colonial context, it is the peasantry rather than the working class that represent truly revolutionary agents. She suggests that Fanon’s theory is not an empirical description of actual peasants and workers in Algeria, but rather a rallying call for the peasantry “to turn ‘bloodthirsty instincts’ into revolutionary action” (p. 445).
  604.  
  605. Find this resource:
  606.  
  607. Sharawy, Helmi. “Frantz Fanon, Globalisation and the African Revolution.” Pambazuka News no. 561 (December 2011).
  608.  
  609. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  610.  
  611. A consideration of how Fanon’s writings remain relevant in the context of contemporary struggles against globalization in Africa. Sharawy provides an interesting re-reading of Fanon’s strengths and weaknesses in his theorization of the African Revolution, and offers some consideration of the popular uprisings throughout North Africa (often described as the “Arab Spring”) in 2010 and 2011.
  612.  
  613. Find this resource:
  614.  
  615. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Fanon and the Revolutionary Class.” In The Capitalist World-Economy, 250–268. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  616.  
  617. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  618.  
  619. Wallerstein, a major world-systems theorist, suggests that just as Marx was not a Marxist, Fanon was not a “Fanonist,” in order to correct simplified readings that had emerged among Fanon’s Marxist critics. While Fanon’s theories regarding the revolutionary potential of the peasantry inspired polemical responses, Wallerstein concludes that reading Fanon should “lead us away from polemics and into a closer analysis of class structures” in Africa (p. 266).
  620.  
  621. Find this resource:
  622.  
  623. Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis
  624. While the body of work cited in the section African Revolution focuses largely on Fanon as a political theorist, there is another important body of work that engages with Fanon as a psychoanalytic theorist, as well as a practicing psychiatrist whose medical work in Algeria and clinical writings are an equally important part of his life and legacy. Some of the texts included here are grounded specifically in the disciplines of psychiatry or psychology, while others draw on readings of Fanon’s engagements with psychoanalytic theory and psychiatric practice for different disciplinary contexts. Adams 1970 represents an early introduction to Fanon’s work within the field of social psychiatry that remains interesting to revisit. McCulloch 1983 and Bulhan 1985 are important full-length studies; the former engages closely with Fanon’s clinical writings (which are much less well known than his political writings), while the latter provides a close reading of Fanon’s critique and refashioning of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis, including those of Freud. Vergès 1996 provides another good introduction to this strand within Fanon’s work, emphasizing that Fanon practiced as a psychiatrist (not a psychoanalyst) and proposing this as an important distinction for reading his work. Keller 2007 provides an excellent understanding of the colonial context of psychiatry in North Africa that Fanon battled against. Vaughan 2008, an extended review of Keller 2007, is also an excellent overview of Fanon’s work at the clinic of Blida-Joinville in Algeria. Bhabha 1986, part of his influential body of work on Fanon, looks closely at Black Skin, White Masks as a way to understand the psychological power of race in the discourse of colonialism. Bergner 1999 revisits Fanon’s work in order to address the role that psychoanalytic theory should (and should not) play in African American and postcolonial studies. Finally, two recent articles engage closely with Fanon’s clinical practice and psychological perspectives in order to apply them to different contemporary contexts: Hilton 2011 compares the contexts of French colonialism and US colonialism and the applicability of Fanon’s work to the psychic violence affecting contemporary Native American communities; Hook and Truscott 2013 brings Fanon’s psychological insights to bear on the context of post-apartheid South Africa.
  625.  
  626. Adams, Paul L. “The Social Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon.” American Journal of Psychiatry 127.6 (1970): 809–814.
  627.  
  628. DOI: 10.1176/ajp.127.6.809Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  629.  
  630. One of the earliest engagements with Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist in Algeria, as well as his writing on (and critique of) more traditional theories of psychology. While it was intended to introduce early readers to Fanon and has been largely superseded by subsequent work, it remains interesting in its discussion of the Eurocentric foundation of much traditional psychology and psychiatry, and the way that Fanon’s practice and writing offers a challenge to these foundations.
  631.  
  632. Find this resource:
  633.  
  634. Bergner, Gwen. “Politics and Pathologies: On the Subject of Race in Psychoanalysis.” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 219–234. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  635.  
  636. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  637.  
  638. Bergner, who had previously written one of the major feminist readings of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (see Bergner 1995, cited under Feminist Approaches), returns to Fanon’s work—in particular, the penultimate chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” alongside the 1949 Hollywood film Home of the Brave—to argue for the continuing importance of psychoanalytic approaches within African American and postcolonial studies today.
  639.  
  640. Find this resource:
  641.  
  642. Bhabha, Homi. “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” In Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–1984. Edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley, 87–101. New York: Methuen, 1986.
  643.  
  644. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  645.  
  646. Part of Bhabha’s influential body of work on Fanon (see also Bhabha 1986 and Bhabha 2004, both cited under General Overviews). The essay focuses on two “primal moments” of encounters with racial difference in Black Skin, White Masks, as part of an analysis of how race functions as a fetish—both a site of fear and loathing and a site of desire—in colonial discourse.
  647.  
  648. Find this resource:
  649.  
  650. Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Springer, 1985.
  651.  
  652. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4899-2269-4Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  653.  
  654. One of the first and still among the most important studies of Fanon as a practicing psychiatrist and as a psychoanalytic theorist whose work included a critique of certain basic principles of psychoanalysis. Bulhan discusses Fanon’s struggle to institute innovative psychiatric techniques amidst the context of colonial medicine, as well as his intellectual struggle to stretch the work of Freud and other founders of psychoanalytic theory in order to apply it to the dehumanizing realities of racism and colonialism.
  655.  
  656. Find this resource:
  657.  
  658. Hilton, Blake T. “Frantz Fanon and Colonialism: A Psychology of Oppression.” Journal of Scientific Psychology (December 2011).
  659.  
  660. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  661.  
  662. Begins with a brief overview of Fanon’s life and work, but its true contribution is Hilton’s comparison of the workings of French colonialism in Algeria with that of US colonialism against indigenous peoples. He uses Fanon’s work on the psychic violence of colonialism to analyze how it might be applied to the violence suffered by Native American communities in the United States.
  663.  
  664. Find this resource:
  665.  
  666. Hook, Derek, and Ross Truscott. “Fanonian Ambivalence: On Psychoanalysis and Postcolonial Critique.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 33.3 (2013): 155–169.
  667.  
  668. DOI: 10.1037/a0033557Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  669.  
  670. Hook and Truscott are specifically concerned with the contributions that psychoanalysis can make to an analysis of the period following official colonial rule; their particular case study is post-apartheid South Africa. Following a close reading how Fanon “stretched” traditional psychoanalytic concepts for an understanding of the colonial situation, they suggest how similar efforts to stretch psychoanalysis today could be applied to situations such as contemporary South Africa.
  671.  
  672. Find this resource:
  673.  
  674. Keller, Richard C. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
  675.  
  676. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429779.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  677.  
  678. Keller’s book is a close study of the uses of psychiatry in the development of French colonialism in North Africa, specifically as it contributed to and helped to create the idea of North Africa as a realm of fantasy, violence, unreason, and madness. It provides an excellent context for understanding the colonial psychiatry against which Fanon’s practice fought, and includes a chapter on Fanon’s resistance to traditional notions of “colonial madness,” alongside the writings of the Algerian novelist, poet, and essayist Kateb Yacine.
  679.  
  680. Find this resource:
  681.  
  682. McCulloch, Jock. Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  683.  
  684. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558559Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  685.  
  686. An important early work on Fanon’s psychiatric practice, with a particular focus on a reading of his clinical writings. McCulloch focuses on how these writings affect Fanon’s evolving political theory, so the book focuses more closely on the latter than the former, but his reading of Fanon’s medical writings remains significant, as does his analysis of Fanon’s engagement with the work of the psychologist Octave Mannoni.
  687.  
  688. Find this resource:
  689.  
  690. Vaughan, Megan. “Breath of Unreason: Fanon’s Psychiatric Hospital.” London Review of Books, 31 July 2008, 29–30.
  691.  
  692. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  693.  
  694. An extended review of Keller 2007. However, it also functions as an excellent overview of Fanon’s work at the Blida-Joinville clinic in Algeria and speaks to his larger psychiatric practice and theory more generally. As such, it is a fine introduction for readers interested in the larger topic, as well as a critical engagement with Keller’s book.
  695.  
  696. Find this resource:
  697.  
  698. Vergès, François. “To Cure and to Free: The Fanonian Project of ‘Decolonized Psychiatry.’” In Fanon: A Critical Reader. Edited by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White, 85–99. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
  699.  
  700. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  701.  
  702. Another excellent introduction to Fanon’s clinical work as a psychiatrist, as well as his more theoretical work on psychoanalysis. Vergès makes the important point that, as against readings of Fanon’s work that suggest that he was himself a psychoanalyst, he never in fact underwent such training or engaged in such practice; as such, it is important to read his engagements with psychoanalytic theory as that of a psychiatric practitioner, not a psychoanalyst.
  703.  
  704. Find this resource:
  705.  
  706. Feminist Approaches
  707. Issues related to gender politics have been a major theme of Fanon studies; indeed, a number of texts cited in different sections of this bibliography approach questions of gender as central to understanding Fanon’s work (in particular, see Mowitt 1992 (cited under African Revolution); Julien 1996 and Spillers 1996 (cited under Sexual Politics); Vergès 1996 and Bergner 1999 (cited under Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis; Butler 2008 and Frazer and Hutchings 2008 (cited under Comparative Work); Moten 2013 (cited under Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies). The texts cited here are examples of work that bring a specifically feminist approach to reading Fanon’s work. A number of feminist readers have offered a critique of Fanon’s gender politics, especially chapters 2 and 3 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” and “The Man of Color and the White Woman.” Other feminist readers have criticized the relentlessly masculinist tone sometimes found in Fanon’s later work, especially in The Wretched of the Earth, and what others have seen as his romanticized portrayal of Algerian women combatants in “Algeria Unveiled,” the first chapter of A Dying Colonialism. This has in turn inspired another set of feminist readers to offer a defense of Fanon’s gender politics. However, the best work of this sort, represented by the texts in this section, sees itself neither as an “attack” upon nor a “defense” of Fanon’s work, but rather as an opening up of his texts through feminist inquiry, with attention paid to all the insights and limitations to be found in his texts. Fuss 1994 and Bergner 1995 both examine Fanon’s engagement with psychoanalysis, particularly in Black Skin, White Masks; they note that even as he undermines some of the racist and colonial foundations of psychoanalytic theory, his work also reproduces important aspects of its problematic gender politics. Decker 1990–1991 and Faulkner 1996 both focus on “Algeria Unveiled,” the former placing it in the context of “terrorist” violence in the Algerian Revolution, the latter reading it alongside the work of the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. hooks 1996 and Sharpley-Whiting 1997 place Fanon’s work in the context of black feminist thought, arguing that the limitations in his own gender politics have not prevented his writings from inspiring subsequent feminist work that brings together problems of race and gender. White 2007 similarly brings to bear a race-gendered analysis of Fanon’s work, addressing the limitations of his understanding of war and violence from a gendered perspective. The most recent piece, Adkins 2013, continues this strand of feminist work on Fanon, stressing the important confluence of race and gender and proposing Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as an important and underappreciated intertext for reading Black Skin, White Masks.
  708.  
  709. Adkins, Amey Victoria. “Black/Feminist Futures: Reading Beauvoir in Black Skin, White Masks.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112.4 (2013): 697–723.
  710.  
  711. DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2345243Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  712.  
  713. Adkins takes Beauvoir’s work, especially her book The Second Sex, as a crucial but largely unexamined intertext for Fanon’s work and finds what she describes as an uncannily similar pattern of analysis in Black Skin, White Masks and The Second Sex. Rather than reading one against the other, Adkins suggests that read together, they offer the opportunity to expand our own theoretical capacity to think problems of race and problems of gender as interconnected.
  714.  
  715. Find this resource:
  716.  
  717. Bergner, Gwen. “Who Is that Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.” PLMA 110 (1995): 75–88.
  718.  
  719. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  720.  
  721. An influential feminist intervention that influenced subsequent work on Black Skin, White Masks. Bergner notes that while Fanon’s engagement with psychoanalysis uncovers how the work of its foundational authors posits a normative white subject, Fanon like Freud, “takes the male as the norm” (p. 76). Analyzing Fanon’s readings of novels by Mayotte Capécia and Rene Maran, Bergner pushes toward a psychoanalytic approach that marks the confluence between gender and race.
  722.  
  723. Find this resource:
  724.  
  725. Decker, Jeffrey Louis. “Terrorism (Un)Veiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algeria.” Cultural Critique 17 (1990–1991): 177–195.
  726.  
  727. DOI: 10.2307/1354144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  728.  
  729. Decker’s essay is a close reading of “Algeria Unveiled,” the first chapter of Fanon’s book A Dying Colonialism and one of the key texts for those bringing feminist approaches to Fanon’s work. Decker’s focus is on analyzing this essay within the context of what he calls the use of “political terrorism” as part of the anticolonial struggle; his reading of Fanon brings out the strengths (and weaknesses) of its representation of the agency of Algerian women combatants.
  730.  
  731. Find this resource:
  732.  
  733. Faulkner, Rita A. “Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land.” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 847–855.
  734.  
  735. DOI: 10.2307/40152312Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  736.  
  737. Faulkner places Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” alongside several texts by Algerian novelist and essayist Assia Djebar, particularly her story “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.” While both writers link veiling to the relationship between women’s bodies and physical space, she suggests that Fanon uses this as a trope for discussing the nation, while Djebar represents the Algerian woman “as a human subject, in possession of herself” (p. 855).
  738.  
  739. Find this resource:
  740.  
  741. Fuss, Diana. “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification.” Diacritics 24 (1994): 20–42.
  742.  
  743. DOI: 10.2307/465162Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  744.  
  745. Another central feminist reading of Fanon’s work, by a major voice in feminist theory. Fuss uses Fanon’s work, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and “Algeria Unveiled,” to revisit what she describes as the colonial history of “identification,” which has been a key term in both psychoanalysis and radical politics. She sees his work as crucial for understanding this process of identification, because Fanon’s analysis “not only describes imperial practices but also, where sexual differences are concerned, problematically enacts them” (p. 39).
  746.  
  747. Find this resource:
  748.  
  749. hooks, bell. “Feminism as a Persistent Critique of History: What’s Love Got to Do With It?” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read, 76–85. Seattle, WA: Bay, 1996.
  750.  
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  752.  
  753. hooks, an influential practitioner of black feminist theory, describes Fanon’s influence upon the development of her work, and the contributions his work might make to feminist and antiracist accounts of history today. While noting Fanon’s problematic gender politics enacted in his critique of Mayotte Capécia in Black Skin, White Masks, she also notes his emphasis on love in that same chapter.
  754.  
  755. Find this resource:
  756.  
  757. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
  758.  
  759. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  760.  
  761. This is the only book-length feminist analysis of Fanon’s work. Sharpley-Whiting offers both a feminist reading of Fanon and a critical look at previous feminist readings of his work. Noting that there are many strands within feminism, she posits Fanon as a foundational thinker for a radical black feminism and places his work in the context of the work of subsequent black feminist thinkers.
  762.  
  763. Find this resource:
  764.  
  765. White, Aaronette M. “All the Men Are Fighting for Freedom, All the Women Are Mourning Their Men, but Some of Us Carried Guns: A Race-Gendered Analysis of Fanon’s Psychological Perspectives on War.” Signs 32 (2007): 857–884.
  766.  
  767. DOI: 10.1086/513021Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  768.  
  769. White begins with Fanon’s psychological perspective on war and violence, particularly his suggestion that violence might prove to be a “cleansing” force in the colonial context. She weighs this perspective against the specifically gendered effects of colonial war in the postcolonial context, including the accounts of women ex-combatants in Mozambique and South Africa, and suggests that one particular weakness in his psychological perspective stems from Fanon’s “neglect of particular gendered aspects of anticolonial war” (p. 858).
  770.  
  771. Find this resource:
  772.  
  773. Sexual Politics
  774. Many readers of Fanon’s work have noted that in key places where Fanon approaches questions of gender politics, he does so through an examination of sexuality. Two chapters of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Woman of Color and the White Man” and “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” focus specifically on the question of interracial sexual relationships. “Algeria Unveiled,” meanwhile, focuses upon the veiled Algerian woman as an object of fascination and desire for the male colonizer (and, some feminist critics have suggested, also for Fanon himself). The importance of these themes in his work, together with some brief but striking remarks that he makes about homosexuality in Martinique in a footnote in Black Skin, White Masks and what some critics have described as the almost overwhelmingly “homosocial” nature of the movement for decolonization as he portrays it in The Wretched of the Earth, has inspired an important and growing body of work on questions of sexual politics in Fanon’s work. Much of this work is based in concerns and issues similar to that of the feminist work cited elsewhere; indeed, the division here is essentially arbitrary and only for the sake of convenience. Again, the texts cited neither simply criticize nor unproblematically defend Fanon’s sexual politics but rather use this examination to elucidate certain strengths and weaknesses in his work and to open up important political and cultural arguments. Dollimore 1991, a foundational text for queer theory, is one of the first texts to address how Fanon’s work on “negrophobia” can contribute to contemporary work on homophobia, while simultaneously calling attention to the homophobia expressed in Fanon’s work itself. Chow 1995, Mercer 1995, and Goldie 1999 make similar points, noting the ways that the anxieties revealed in Fanon’s work, whether about the sexual agency of women of color or those regarding same-sex desire among men of color, mark points of limitation both in his own analysis and in anticolonial and antiracist theory and politics more generally. Spillers 1996 also examines Fanon’s writing on the sexuality of women of color through a reading of his engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Kalisa 2002 takes this move into the larger context of Fanon’s work a step further, asking how addressing the sexuality of black women would change the field of postcolonial studies. Finally, Thomas 2007 takes a different direction, reading the work of Fanon alongside that of the African American novelist Chester Himes to suggest that taken together, their work offers important tools for resisting racism at the psychosexual level.
  775.  
  776. Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” UTS Review 1 (1995): 5–29.
  777.  
  778. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  779.  
  780. Chow, an influential postcolonial feminist theorist, suggests that since race constitutes, for Fanon, a barrier to admittance to the “white world,” he proposes creating an alternative community: the postcolonial nation. This, she argues, is why Fanon betrays such anxiety about the possibility of miscegenation: the sexual agency of the woman of color represents, according to Chow, a threat to Fanon’s notion of the nation.
  781.  
  782. Find this resource:
  783.  
  784. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  785.  
  786. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112259.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787.  
  788. Dollimore’s pioneering work asks the question of why homosexuality, which has been socially marginal, has at the same time been symbolically central to the very societies that denounced it as “deviant.” Fanon’s work plays a role throughout the book, placed amidst a large, wide-ranging group of authors (as the title implies); the homophobia that can be found in Black Skin, White Masks, Dollimore argues, is particularly ironic, since for him, Fanon’s analysis of racism and “negrophobia” is instructive for understanding sexual discrimination and homophobia.
  789.  
  790. Find this resource:
  791.  
  792. Goldie, Terry. “Saint Fanon and ‘Homosexual Territory.’” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 75–86. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  793.  
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  795.  
  796. Goldie, a theorist who has worked between postcolonial studies and queer theory, alludes in his title to David Halperin’s 1995 book Saint Foucault, and accordingly, his work is a call not to simply turn Fanon “into the patron of all marginalized peoples” (p. 76). One crucial blind spot for Goldie is Fanon’s characterization of “homosexual territory” as a space of psychopathology, at least in part, he argues, because for Fanon the idea of same-sex desire among men threatened the homosocial world of the decolonization movement.
  797.  
  798. Find this resource:
  799.  
  800. Kalisa, Marie-Chantal. “Black Women and Literature: Revisiting Frantz Fanon’s Gender Politics.” Literary Griot 14.12 (Spring/Fall 2002): 1–22.
  801.  
  802. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  803.  
  804. Kalisa’s essay notes Fanon’s centrality to ongoing work in the field of postcolonial studies, which views the formation of racial identities as the product of colonial power. However, she asks, what is the role of gender and sexuality within the formation of racial identities in the colonial and postcolonial context? Her study focuses on how Fanon’s work partially affirms, and partially excludes, the sexuality of black women.
  805.  
  806. Find this resource:
  807.  
  808. Mercer, Kobena. “Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia.” In Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. Edited by Ragnar Farr, 57–72. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1995.
  809.  
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  811.  
  812. Mercer reads Fanon alongside work by contemporary black visual artists that articulates sexual and racial difference together. For Mercer, the question of sexual politics in Fanon’s work is significant, since liberation movements “came to a halt precisely around the ‘interior’ spaces of sexuality” (p. 31). Reading these “disappointing” aspects of Fanon’s work is thus necessary for efforts to engage with racial and sexual difference.
  813.  
  814. Find this resource:
  815.  
  816. Spillers, Hortense. “‘All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.” Boundary 2 23 (1996): 710–734.
  817.  
  818. DOI: 10.2307/303639Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  819.  
  820. Spillers’s essay (which takes its title from a composition by the jazz musician Thelonious Monk) begins from the premise that traditional theories of psychoanalysis have generally been of little use in understanding the African American experience. She cites the work of Fanon as perhaps the one exception to this rule, largely because Fanon addressed the limitations of psychoanalysis for understanding racism, even as he applied it to the problems of racism and colonialism throughout this work.
  821.  
  822. Find this resource:
  823.  
  824. Thomas, Greg. “On Psycho-Sexual Racism and Pan-African Revolt: Fanon and Chester Himes.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5.3 (2007).
  825.  
  826. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  827.  
  828. Thomas draws on links between Fanon’s work and that of African American novelist Chester Himes, as well as the fact that Fanon often referred to Himes’s work, especially his 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, a key text in Black Skin, White Masks. He argues that both writers are particularly effective at revealing the psychosexual aspects of racism and colonialism.
  829.  
  830. Find this resource:
  831.  
  832. Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies
  833. Beginning in the 1980s, an increasing number of readings of Fanon’s work have come from within the disciplines of literary and cultural studies (see, for example, Gordon, et al. 1996, cited under Collections of Essays, which addresses this development as part of their discussion of Fanon studies). For some, this has been a problem: for such critics, the move from the first generation of Fanon studies, which focused largely on the direct applicability of Fanon’s work to ongoing anticolonial struggles in Africa and antiracist struggles in the United States, to work more grounded in cultural analysis, represents an attempt to “de-politicize” his work. Others, however, have noted that such work has called attention to the crucial role of literary and cultural analysis in Fanon’s own body of work. Film, for example, constitutes an important touchstone in Fanon’s work: indeed, in Black Skin, White Masks, the experience of a black spectator viewing racist stereotypes in films (whether the “natives” in Tarzan movies or the “Negro servant” in Hollywood films) is a recurring theme. The work cited here includes a wide range of perspectives on Fanon’s work, using approaches drawn from the disciplines of literary, cultural, and media studies, and in some cases, making the case for Fanon’s work itself as belonging to these disciplines. Berger 1990 suggests that contemporary criticism of Anglophone African literature has been strongly influenced by what he calls “Fanonism,” an approach drawn from a reading of Fanon’s work. A number of more recent texts engage with Fanon’s work itself as a form of cultural studies: Kaplan 1999 examines Fanon’s engagements with cinema and trauma around the issue of film spectatorship; Mowitt 1999 and Baucom 2001 both examine what they see as Fanon’s keen ear and practice of listening to and responding to a variety of voices in Black Skin, White Masks and A Dying Colonialism, while Moten 2013 places Fanon against contemporary critical work from the school of “Afro-pessimism” and gently chides Fanon for not being a better listener when engaging in his analysis of literature and culture. This section also includes two creative works on Fanon that are of interest to any reader of his work: Julien 1996, a film that constitutes both a biography of Fanon and a close reading of his work, and Wideman 2008, a novel that represents a complex engagement with Fanon’s life and work by an influential contemporary African American novelist (Kahana 2005–2006 is an analysis of Julien’s film, and Naimou 2013 is a close reading of Wideman’s novel alongside Fanon’s work). Finally, also included below is Olsson 2014, an acclaimed recent film that uses the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth as the inspiration for a documentary on the struggle for decolonization in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
  834.  
  835. Baucom, Ian. “Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening Authors.” Contemporary Literature 42 (2001): 15–49.
  836.  
  837. DOI: 10.2307/1209083Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  838.  
  839. Baucom notes that as a psychiatrist and as a writer, Fanon was “a professional listener”; his texts reveal a method by which Fanon records and responds to many diverse voices around him. He suggests that all of his texts thus function as “listening devices”; this form of listening is crucial to what Baucom calls Fanon’s “solidarity poetics” (p. 17).
  840.  
  841. Find this resource:
  842.  
  843. Berger, Roger A. “Contemporary Anglophone Literary Theory: The Return of Fanon.” Research in African Literatures 21 (1990): 141–151.
  844.  
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  846.  
  847. Although this essay actually has little to say about Fanon’s work itself, it is still of interest for its suggestion that a theoretical movement that Berger calls “Fanonism” has provided an important critical method for reading contemporary Anglophone African literature. He suggests that what he calls the “Fanonist threshold” has been used to separate literary and theoretical approaches that accommodate Western techniques from those that are engaged in “the search for an Afrocentric means of reading and understanding texts” (p. 142).
  848.  
  849. Find this resource:
  850.  
  851. Julien, Isaac. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask. London: Normal Film, 1996.
  852.  
  853. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  854.  
  855. A film by one of the most significant Black British filmmakers and an excellent introduction to Fanon’s life and work. Julien intersperses scenes from Fanon’s life (with Fanon played by the British actor Colin Salmon) with passages from his work and interviews with Fanon’s family and associates (including his brother Joby and his son Olivier) and important readers of his work (including Stuart Hall and François Vergès).
  856.  
  857. Find this resource:
  858.  
  859. Kahana, Jonathan. “The Ethics of Listening: Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon.” Film Quarterly 59 (2005–2006): 19–31.
  860.  
  861. DOI: 10.1525/fq.2005.59.2.19Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  862.  
  863. Kahana’s article is a close reading of Julien 1996, considering it within Julien’s previous body of work and also alongside Fanon’s writings, in particular Black Skin, White Masks. He highlights the film’s innovative use of sound, suggesting that while the film (like Fanon’s work) focuses on the question of the gaze and the relationship between looking and racial identification, this focus on sound also shifts the form of reception of the film from that of spectatorship to listening, and further, that causing the viewer to engage in the act of listening is part of the film’s larger ethical mission.
  864.  
  865. Find this resource:
  866.  
  867. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Fanon, Trauma, and Cinema.” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 146–157. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  868.  
  869. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  870.  
  871. Kaplan, a pioneering feminist film theorist, focuses on the issue of trauma in Fanon’s work, especially traumatic forms of racial identification represented in Black Skin, White Masks, by analyzing the trauma Fanon associates with viewing racist stereotypes in the movies. In fact, she suggests, Fanon was “implicitly theorizing” the issue of cinema and/as trauma “long before trauma became a humanities focus” (p. 146).
  872.  
  873. Find this resource:
  874.  
  875. Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly 112.4 (2013): 737–780.
  876.  
  877. DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2345261Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  878.  
  879. Moten’s essay places Fanon’s work in the context of “Afro-pessimism” as found in writers such as Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton, which Moten sees as “the most exciting and generative advance in black critical theory” today (p. 737). Unlike Baucom 2001, Moten’s largely appreciative reading chides Fanon for sometimes not listening closely enough to the voices he represents and responds to in his work.
  880.  
  881. Find this resource:
  882.  
  883. Mowitt, John. “Breaking Up Fanon’s Voice.” In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini, 89–98. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  884.  
  885. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  886.  
  887. Mowitt’s essay is one that takes seriously the idea of Fanon’s work as a form of cultural studies. Examining the reception of his work over the previous three decades, he problematizes the oft-invoked reference to Fanon as “the voice of the African Revolution” by considering the way he engages with and represents a variety of voices in his work, nowhere more clearly than in the chapter “‘This Is the Voice of Algeria’” in A Dying Colonialism.
  888.  
  889. Find this resource:
  890.  
  891. Naimou, Angela. “Masking Fanon.” College English 40.3 (2013): 38–59.
  892.  
  893. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  894.  
  895. Naimou’s essay is a close reading of Wideman 2008 alongside Fanon’s own work. In her reading, she succeeds in bringing out both the melancholy tone of much of Wideman’s novel, which marks the narrator’s distance from the spirit of the anticolonial era from which Fanon’s work emerged, as well as the continuing inspiration that the narrator draws from Fanon, culminating in the writing of the novel itself.
  896.  
  897. Find this resource:
  898.  
  899. Olsson, Göran. Concerning Violence. Stockholm: Final Cut for Real, 2014.
  900.  
  901. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  902.  
  903. This recent documentary film takes its title and its inspiration from the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. It intersperses excerpts from Fanon’s text with scenes from the struggle for decolonization in a number of African countries in the 1960s and 1970s, including newly discovered archival footage presented here for the first time. The version of the film made for release in the United States is narrated by musician and actress Lauryn Hill.
  904.  
  905. Find this resource:
  906.  
  907. Wideman, John Edgar. Fanon: A Novel. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
  908.  
  909. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  910.  
  911. Wideman’s novel combines an imaginative attempt to re-imagine episodes from Fanon’s life—including a trip Fanon made to Mali in 1960—with an account of the narrator’s engagement with Fanon’s work. “I wanted to be somebody, an unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Frantz Fanon whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution,” Wideman writes, expressing a feeling shared by many of Fanon’s admiring readers (p. 4).
  912.  
  913. Find this resource:
  914.  
  915. Fanon and Contemporary Politics
  916. This final section includes recently published work that brings Fanon’s life and work into conversation with contemporary political contexts and struggles. While the texts cited below feature a variety of different approaches to and readings of Fanon’s work, they all begin by proposing the continuing relevance of his work for contemporary politics. However, none of these works is interested in stopping at simply declaring the relevance of Fanon, or suggesting that his work holds the answers to the political problems we face today. Instead, they work in two different directions: they find tools in Fanon’s texts for helping to analyze (and in some cases to actively support) contemporary struggles in a number of different places and contexts; they also, in turn, draw upon these different places and contexts, and on political movements engaged in struggles against racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression today, to return to Fanon’s work with new eyes and to propose different ways of understanding his work. Several texts consider the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 2011 alongside the popular uprisings and revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East of 2010 and 2011 that have come to be called “the Arab Uprisings”: Abbas 2011 finds in Fanon’s work not only a celebration of anticolonial movements but a warning against the regimes that would inherit postcolonial states, against which today’s revolutionaries continue to struggle; Gordon 2011 suggests that we need to return to Fanon’s notion of “national consciousness” in order to resist the counter-revolutionary ideology we live with today and to support the emerging revolutions of the Arab Spring; Munif 2012 engages in a conversation with Nigel Gibson in order to suggest how Fanon’s work speaks to these contemporary uprisings and challenges the concepts we apply to them. Two other texts focus specifically upon Palestine as a site of continuing colonial oppression and anticolonial (not to mention antiracist) struggle: Abraham 2013 uses Fanon’s analysis of colonial and anticolonial violence to examine the phenomenon of suicide bombing in Palestine-Israel, and Rego 2012 uses Fanon’s analysis of the development of a historical-racial schema in the colonial context to examine the situation of Palestinians as colonial subjects under Israeli law. Gibson 2011 brings Fanon’s revolutionary writings to bear upon South Africa, not only in terms of the struggle against apartheid but also in terms of the continuing struggle of anticolonial political movements in post-apartheid South Africa. In a different context, Kipfer 2011 examines another “post-colonial anti-colonial” struggle, this one in France, the heart of empire, where groups such as the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic carry on the fight against contemporary French racism. Finally, Alessandrini 2014 represents a book-length attempt to “appropriate” Fanon’s work for our contemporary cultural and political context, placing his work in the context of South Africa, the Arab Uprisings, and contemporary debates about violence and nonviolence.
  917.  
  918. Abbas, Fatin. “Year of the Boomerang? Frantz Fanon and the Arab Uprisings.” Open Democracy (11 April 2011).
  919.  
  920. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  921.  
  922. Abbas’s essay marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wretched of the Earth by linking it to the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in 2010 and 2011. He emphasizes that Fanon’s text is both a celebration of the decolonization struggle and a prescient cautionary text, offering a warning against regimes that would inherit post-independence states—the very regimes against which a new generation struggles today.
  923.  
  924. Find this resource:
  925.  
  926. Abraham, Matthew. “The Fanonian Specter in Palestine: Suicide Bombing and the Last Colonial War.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 99–114.
  927.  
  928. DOI: 10.1215/00382876-1891269Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  929.  
  930. Abraham uses the fiftieth anniversary of The Wretched of the Earth to revisit Fanon’s analysis of violence in the decolonization struggle, raising the question of how to address suicide bombing in Palestine as a form of anticolonial struggle, and suggesting that the “dream” of the colonized that Fanon describes might find its form today in “a death mission against the colonizers” (p. 100).
  931.  
  932. Find this resource:
  933.  
  934. Alessandrini, Anthony C. Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
  935.  
  936. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  937.  
  938. Suggests that readers today must “appropriate” aspects of Fanon’s work that speak to our contemporary context, placing Fanon in dialogue Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy, and using his work to consider contemporary political struggles, including those of the Arab Spring, which Alessandrini renames “the African Spring,” as well as contemporary debates about violence versus nonviolence.
  939.  
  940. Find this resource:
  941.  
  942. Gibson, Nigel. Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
  943.  
  944. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  945.  
  946. Gibson reads Fanon’s work as crucial for understanding struggles in South Africa, both the fight to overthrow apartheid as well as the continuing political struggles of the post-apartheid era. He connects Fanon’s work with that of the writer and activist Steve Biko and of the shack-dwellers’ movement, led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, to resist “the fact of shack-ness” in South Africa today.
  947.  
  948. Find this resource:
  949.  
  950. Gordon, Jane Anna. “Revolutionary in Counter-Revolutionary Times: Elaborating Fanonian National Consciousness into the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19 (2011).
  951.  
  952. DOI: 10.5195/jffp.2011.476Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  953.  
  954. Gordon begins from what she sees as the paradoxical challenge of reading The Wretched of the Earth today: while Fanon’s book is an irredeemably revolutionary text, we live in a counter-revolutionary context, where even the idea of revolution has been largely discredited. Against this current, she suggests a need to revisit Fanon’s notion of “national consciousness,” which she sees as newly crucial for understanding and supporting the still-unfolding forms of revolution in North Africa and the Middle East.
  955.  
  956. Find this resource:
  957.  
  958. Kipfer, Stefan. “Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today.” Antipode 43.4 (2011): 1155–1180.
  959.  
  960. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00851.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  961.  
  962. Kipfer’s article is a close study of ongoing antiracist and anticolonial struggles in France today, with particular attention to the work of Le Mouvement des Indigenes de la Republique (the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, or “MIR”), and that of its founding intellectuals, Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. In articulating what it refers to as “a post-colonial anti-colonialism” against current racist and anti-immigrant discourses that draw upon France’s colonial legacy, Kipfer sees MIR as following the inspiration provided by Fanon in his work.
  963.  
  964. Find this resource:
  965.  
  966. Munif, Yasser. “Frantz Fanon and the Arab Uprisings: An Interview with Nigel Gibson.” Jadaliyya (17 August 2012).
  967.  
  968. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  969.  
  970. Munif, a sociologist and co-founder of the Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution, interviews the influential Fanon critic Nigel Gibson about the ongoing popular uprisings and revolutions often described as “the Arab Spring.” In their discussion, Gibson emphasizes not only the continuing relevance of Fanon’s work in this revolutionary context but also the way in which his methodological approach forces us to rethink our own concepts as we try to find ways to apply them to new revolutions and struggles.
  971.  
  972. Find this resource:
  973.  
  974. Rego, Nasser. “Reading Fanon in Palestine/Israel.” Jadaliyya (9 April 2012).
  975.  
  976. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  977.  
  978. Rego connects the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s death with the election of Asher Grunis as President of the Israeli Supreme Court in February 2012, using Fanon’s work to articulate the situation of Palestinians as a colonized people within Israel. He draws upon Fanon’s account of a historical-racial schema to discuss the racialization of Palestinians in Israel, and their legal experiences under Israeli law.
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