Frantz Fanon Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was an ethno-psychiatrist and political theorist who spent his adult life fighting racism and promoting social justice. He was a Renaissance man who practiced medicine, actively resisted French imperialism, and wrote prolifically on a range of issues across the disciplines of political science, psychology, sociology, and economics. He is widely known in the early twenty-first century as an antiracist revolutionary who advocated violence as a means of liberating the third world from European colonialism.

Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He was the fifth of eight children born into a middle-class black family that had the means to send him to the Lycée Schoelcher, where he received a French-colonial education. As an Afro-Caribbean growing up in a French colony, he witnessed at an early age white condescension and racism toward blacks. At the same time, he was taught by the Négritude poet Aimé Césaire, who challenged the dominance of French culture and advocated black pride. The psychology and politics of colonialism thus became dominant themes in Fanon’s life and work.

In 1943, at the age of eighteen, Fanon joined the Free French forces led by Charles de Gaulle and was sent to fight in North Africa and Europe during World War II (1939–1945). After the war Fanon returned to France and studied psychiatry at the University of Lyon. He defended his dissertation in November 1951 and in the following year married MarieJosephe Dublé, with whom he had one son. While working at a hospital in Saint-Alban, France, Fanon observed a variety of psychiatric problems among Algerian and Moroccan immigrants resulting from French racism, which he called the “North African syndrome. ”These experiences provided material for a collection of essays on language, sexuality, racism, and black identity that were published in a seminal book titled Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

In 1953 Fanon was appointed chief physician at the state hospital in Blida-Joinville, Algeria, which was then part of France. While caring for patients there he again observed the many pathological effects of French racism against the Algerians. Deciding that he could no longer work for the French in their colonial hospital, he joined the Algerian independence movement Front de Libération National (FLN) and resigned from his post. The French subsequently expelled Fanon and his wife and son from Algeria. Exiled in Tunisia, he continued practicing psychiatry and began writing for El Moudjahid (The Freedom Fighter), the underground newspaper of the FLN. He became the spokesperson for the FLN, twice narrowly escaped assassination, and in 1960 served as the Algerian ambassador to Ghana.

Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia in late 1960 and sought treatment first in the Soviet Union and then in the United States. While sick and dying, he hurriedly finished The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a masterpiece for which French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. This book, in which Fanon wrote that colonized peoples are emancipated through violence against their oppressors, quickly became an iconic handbook of third world liberation. When Fanon died on December 6, 1961, at the age of thirty-six, he was hailed by many as a revolutionary prophet.

Bibliography:

Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking, 1970. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1968. First published 1952.
A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove, 1967.
Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. New York: Grove, 1967.
The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963. First published 1961.
Geismar, Peter. Fanon. New York: Dial, 1971.