with such esteemed intellectual figures as Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). His history must also be anchored within a deeper history of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the Americas that touched his life in different ways. Fanon is part of the history of the Black Atlantic—a world of transatlantic connections between Africa, Europe, and the Americas—as well as the intellectual milieu of mid-twentieth-century European continental philosophy. Above all, Fanon witnessed the emergence of a new world order through European decolonization and political independence in Africa and Asia, achieved through strident public criticism and violent armed struggle. Fanon occupied several political, professional, and intellectual worlds that underwent profound shifts over the course of his brief lifetime—worlds that he himself helped define.
The colonial and metropolitan settings Fanon traversed have also generated an intricate set of political and intellectual legacies that must be untangled—from the Caribbean, to Africa and the Middle East, to university settings in Europe and North America. His life presents a distinct historical problem, resisting conformity to many existing narratives of black intellectual history and the origins of revolutionary thought. David Macey, a biographer of Fanon, has written that despite the continued popularity of Fanon’s books and his widespread name recognition, he remains something of an enigma, a quality that can be attributed to his contingent cosmopolitanism: from his birth and childhood in Martinique, to his military service and early career in France, to his eventual activism in Algeria and North Africa. These contrasting contexts produced a sequence of identities that were geopolitical—Martinican, French, and Algerian—as well as occupational—soldier, student, psychiatrist, writer, and diplomat. They added layers of experience that both reinforced and unraveled his sociopolitical status as a black citizen of the French Empire, as he critically examined in first book, Black Skin, White Masks. This wide-ranging geography has also contributed to an uneven memory of Fanon that has been romanticized, contested, and, in some locales, nearly forgotten.
In France the legacy of Fanon has largely been absent or ignored until recently, in step with a general French ambivalence toward Algeria. Representing a profound loss to France, the French government refused to call the Algerian War—known as the Algerian Revolution in Algeria—a war at all, since defining it as such would imply that Algeria was a separate territory apart from France, an idea antithetical to many French. Because of the French government’s preference for classifying it as a police action until 1999, it became popularly known, particularly among critics, as the “war without a name.”9 In contrast, Fanon’s intellectual contributions have been eulogized extensively within the field of postcolonial studies, as well as African American and African diasporic studies in North America. Engagement with his work by such scholars as Homi K. Bhabha, Ato Sekyi-Otu, Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson, and others has resulted in the canonization of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth as essential works for understanding the psychological impact of colonial racism and the politics of decolonization during the twentieth century. Such assessments have created a stronger Anglophone, rather than Francophone, tradition in Fanon studies. Indeed, there is an incongruity that Fanon’s reputation has reached its apex in the American academy, given his criticism toward the United States and his premature death there—the only occasion he visited the country. A more tragic irony is that his posthumous status in Martinique is a contested one and that his memory in Algeria has greatly diminished. Algeria has moved well beyond its revolutionary period, its politics more recently defined by civil conflict since the early 1990s that has pitted the government against Islamic insurgents, leaving as many as 200,000 dead. The places that meant the most to Fanon have treated the contributions of his life either with gradual forgetfulness or disregard.
Fanon’s relative obscurity in Martinique until recently has been attributed to his permanent departure from there and his eventual burial in Algeria. Regarding his compatriot’s unsettled memory, the critic Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) once wrote, “It so happens that years go by without his name (not to mention his work) being mentioned by the media, whether political or cultural, revolutionary or leftist, of Martinique. An avenue in Fort-de-France is named after him. That is about it.”10 Joby Fanon has recalled that his younger brother Frantz was seen as a traitor for his radical politics against France, given that Martinique has remained a part of France to the present day.11 But Martinique was ultimately a place of childhood. Fanon achieved his fame elsewhere. Martinican residents such as Césaire, Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau (1953–present) have contributed more to the island’s intellectual and political life. Albert Memmi (1920–present)—the Tunisian writer whose influential work The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) is often compared with Fanon’s—has suggested that Fanon developed an ambivalence toward his home, as witnessed in arguments made in Black Skin, White Masks.12 At a 1978 United Nations (UN) conference held in tribute to Fanon’s legacy, the intellectual C. L. R. James (1901–1989) discussed how Fanon left the Caribbean in the same way that activist George Padmore (1903–1959) and James himself had once left, believing more fervently in Africa’s revolution than any political change in the Caribbean. However, James believed that Fanon would have returned.13 Indeed, this possibility is indicated in a late essay attributed to Fanon. Titled “Blood Flows in the Antilles under French Domination” (1960), this piece compares Martinique’s situation to Algeria’s, with Fanon expressing the sentiment of being “violently shaken” by recent events in the place of his birth.14
The decline of Fanon’s memory in Algeria poses equally difficult questions. One answer for this absence was his lack of a top leadership position within the anticolonial National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale or FLN) and his consequent marginalization within the pantheon of Algerian nationalists. The nature of the Algerian struggle itself stressed the role of the popular masses—one slogan being “Only one hero: the People”—over the importance of individual leaders. Authority within the FLN was also no guarantee, as the party was wracked by internal divisions during and after the war—the untimely removal of Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012), Algeria’s first president, in 1965 being a case in point. More significant, however, was the perception of Fanon as a foreigner in Algeria, despite his political allegiance to the FLN and his burial in the eastern part of the country. It is a view that has never diminished. Although his name marks the hospital where he once worked, as well as a school and a street in Algiers, Fanon has remained an outsider, his personal history in Algeria being fixed to a specific period. At the same 1978 UN meeting, Mohamed Bedjaoui, the Algerian ambassador to France, tacitly captured this ambiguity, saying Fanon was “still alive in our hearts” seventeen years after his death, though Bedjaoui would not “give way to the very strong temptation to claim him for Algeria, because that most certainly would narrow the scope of a man whose only frontiers were the boundaries of freedom, of justice and of dignity.”15 Fanon himself began to think beyond Algeria toward the end of his life, with The Wretched of the Earth outlining a broader political geography that encompassed the rest of Africa and the rising Third World. But the political language he articulated has also had, arguably, less utility and declining meaning over the past fifty years for Algerians, given its strident critique of French colonialism. The paradigms of thought that his work confronted—including Négritude and ethno-psychiatry, in addition to French racism and colonialism—appear to be a world apart for generations of Algerians born since the revolution.
This book is written against this perception of irrelevance. Following the lead of other scholars, it argues for Fanon’s continued significance based on his enduring insights. He was not only a critic of colonialism but an early critic of postcolonialism, with hard-won assessments that still apply to present-day Algeria and elsewhere. This book further makes this case for Fanon’s importance through the example of his life. In particular, this book stresses the form of political engagement Fanon cultivated—what I call radical empathy. Radical empathy is not an expression that he used. I introduce it in this book to reinterpret his concerns and to capture the individual, rather than national or anticolonial, politics he defined and exemplified. Indeed, Fanon ultimately declared himself Algerian, exemplifying a revolutionary transformation in his own subjectivity. But radical empathy provided a first step. As a concept and practice, it seeks to move Fanon away from textual abstraction by outlining a personal and more affective dimension to his political commitments. Grounded in his medical