Frantz Fanon
A Biography
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925–61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, in which he saw combat at the end of the Second World War. In Algeria, Fanon came into contact with the Front de Libération Nationale, whose ruthless struggle for independence was met with exceptional violence from the French forces. He identified closely with the liberation movement, and his political sympathies eventually forced him out the country, whereupon he became a propagandist and ambassador for the FLN, as well as a seminal anticolonial theorist.
David Macey’s eloquent life of Fanon provides a comprehensive account of a complex individual’s personal, intellectual and political development. It is also a richly detailed depiction of postwar French culture. Fanon is revealed as a flawed and passionate humanist deeply committed to eradicating colonialism.
Now updated with new historical material, Frantz Fanon remains the definitive biography of a truly revolutionary thinker.
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Macey (Lacan in Context), British translator, biographer and critic, is one of the foremost English-language chroniclers of the distinctive postwar French hybrids of psychological, political and historical thought. His Lives of Michel Foucault is so far the definitive biographical study of the prodigious thinker, and this biography of a fervent anti-colonialist revolutionary may be even more important for the role it could play in bringing Fanon's writings out of the American academy and back into common discussion. Fanon (1925 1961) was a native of Martinique, more than 10 years the junior of the radical "negritude" poet (and current mayor of Fort-de-France) Aim C saire, who was one of his high school teachers. By the time Fanon's brilliant, blistering diatribe Black Skin, White Masks appeared from a Paris publisher in 1952, Fanon was a psychiatrist; he had been part of a Moroccan-based resistance unit during the war, and had found the white left irredeemably bigoted. (Fanon described the book as a study in "language and aggressivity.") Fanon's colossal shifts of registers (political, medical, poetic, sociological) in the book's phenomenology of racism are well explicated by Macey, who gives nuanced accounts of the African nationalist essays and books that followed (primarily concerning Algeria, where Fanon practiced), and complicates Fanon's advocacy of violence-as-catharsis one of the facets of his work that attracted the radical American left of the '60s. Macey does a terrific job throughout reconstructing the contexts in which Fanon conceived and wrote his works, and the terms with which one might best approach them. The book will be invaluable to scholars, but those looking for an entr e into postwar Francophone literature and its political militancy will find this book an excellent guide to notoriously thorny works, and to their author, who died of cancer soon after his illness was discovered.
