The Rebel's Clinic
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Named a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker | Vulture | Los Angeles Review of Books | Foreign Affairs | The New Republic
Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
“Nimble and engrossing . . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"Undoubtedly the best [biography of Fanon] . . . A remarkable achievement." —Robert J. C. Young, Los Angeles Review of Books
A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today’s movements for social and racial justice.
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War–era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.
Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs
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.
