The Rebel's Clinic
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize 2024
Prospect Magazine Books of the Year 2024: Lives
Guardian Best Biographies & Memoirs 2024
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a French colony, in 1925. As a young man, he volunteered to fight in de Gaulle's army for the liberation of France, and trained to become a doctor and psychiatrist. His experiences as a Black man under French colonial rule had a profound effect on him. In 1952, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a vital analysis of the effects of racism on the human psyche.
He was later re-assigned to a hospital in French Algeria. It was here that he became involved in the rebellion of the National Liberation Front (FLN), who fought to break free from colonial power. Fanon's work for the FLN as a propagandist and psychiatrist became highly contentious. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961 just before he died at the age of 36. It has proved to be one of the most controversial yet influential books of our time.
The Rebel's Clinic is a searing biography of the short and harrowing life of Frantz Fanon, and a brilliant, nuanced exploration of his ideas, whose legacy is still so powerful. In an age when debates about race and the effects of colonialism are ever more urgent, The Rebel's Clinic is a profoundly relevant book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this perceptive biography, Shatz (Writers and Missionaries), the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, chronicles the life of psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), covering his childhood in French colonial Martinique, service in the Free French Forces during WWII, disillusionment with the "myth of French color blindness" while studying medicine in Lyon, and immersion in the 1950s Algerian independence movement. Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon's thinking, Shatz discusses the theorist's skepticism of the negritude movement, his work on a Marxist "collective approach to care" at the Saint-Alban asylum, and the influence existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte's Anti-Semite and Jew had on Fanon's understanding of racism. The nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon's life fit together, as when Shatz suggests that Fanon's commitment to providing psychiatric patients with a "sense of selfhood and dignity" while practicing in Algeria led him to embrace the country's independence movement. Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon's two masterworks (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth), contending that the latter's endorsement of violence's redemptive power was "at odds with his findings as a doctor" to Algerian patients suffering from "hallucinations and muscular rigidity, suicidal and murderous urges, depression, and apathy" after battling French forces. The result is a striking appraisal of a towering thinker.
