beyond the antiracism and anticolonial violence he famously promoted, though this practice of moral engagement emerged from these better-known positions. Fanon’s politics were not purely contrarian. They equally sought new forms of connection and solidarity.
This approach thus not only seeks to provide an alternative understanding of his life. It intends to make him more accessible—less a myth, and more human. Since his death in 1961, Fanon’s thought has influenced activists across the world, from civil rights struggles in the United States to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. More recently, the Arab Spring that swept North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 recalled earlier histories of regional political dissent, of which Fanon was a vital part. Controversy over Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank has also revived Fanonian views toward settler colonialism. Fanon presents a genealogy of twentieth-century activism different from figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), and Desmond Tutu (1931–present), each of whom espoused nonviolence as a means for achieving political change. Similar to figures like Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), and Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), Fanon instead advocated certain forms of violence as a political necessity, reflecting an extended period of armed struggle during the 1950s and 1960s that included the First Indochina War (1946–54) against French rule in Southeast Asia, the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–60) in British colonial Kenya, the Cuban Revolution (1953–59) led by Fidel Castro (1926–present) and Guevara, and the turn of South Africa’s antiapartheid struggle to armed resistance, most notably through the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a military organization founded in 1961 by the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.
Violence remains the most controversial issue regarding Fanon—an intrinsic, yet polarizing, dimension of his work that has strengthened his critics and been an inconvenient topic for his admirers. It arguably explains the greater popularity of Black Skin, White Masks over The Wretched of the Earth—the latter outlining his argument for violent struggle. It is an issue that still deserves debate. But to mark this embrace of violence as the singular feature of Fanon’s politics is too reductive. Violence remained a strategic choice. It was historically situated for Fanon—a response to the pure violence of colonialism. Armed struggle did not apply universally across time and place. Indeed, this prevalent critical perspective on Fanon, popularized by other intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), often elides his experience as a psychiatrist who treated victims of torture and violence during the Algerian War.16 Fanon did not categorically promote violence for this reason. Unlike Mao, Guevara, and Cabral, he did not pick up a gun and find a permanent place on the battlefield of revolution. Though he argued for its tactical necessity and cathartic potential, Fanon recognized its traumatic impact from firsthand experience.
His greater political legacy—still relevant today—is the form of political empathy he nurtured in Algeria and Tunisia, while active with the FLN. Fanon was neither Algerian, nor an Arab, nor a Muslim by birth. Unlike many anticolonial leaders and activists, he did not participate in a struggle located in his country of origin. His arrival in Algeria was based entirely on professional contingencies. Fanon’s identification with the Algerian struggle, however, ultimately rested with his own experience with French colonialism, the self-knowledge he gained with Black Skin, White Masks, and his consequent ability to empathize with the Algerian people and their situation as depicted in A Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth—despite his own experiences of discrimination by Algerians, despite class and cultural distinctions between himself and those he sought to represent, despite lack of fluency in Arabic, despite being considered a foreigner.
Josie Fanon, his wife, once said that people “have often wondered why he should have taken part in the liberation of a country which was not his originally.” Her reply was that only “narrow minds and hearts” for whom race or religion “constitutes an unbridgeable gulf” fail to understand—there was no contradiction or dilemma for Fanon, only necessity.17 Fanon achieved this kind of transcendence of identity only through the intense self-reflection that characterized his intellectual life, combined with the personal mobility and expansive geography that his life eventually encompassed, granting him a perspective he would not have attained otherwise. Yet radical empathy is not synonymous with cosmopolitanism. It is a political outcome of cosmopolitanism. It is a civic effect of his transcolonial experiences in Martinique and Algeria, as well as his postcolonial experiences in Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, and Mali. Radical empathy is one struggled-for result of the “total understanding” Fanon sought and first identified in Black Skin, White Masks, as cited in the opening epigraph. It is a mechanism for the new humanism he aspired to at the end of The Wretched of the Earth. His internationalism and political evolution were firmly interwoven.
This book therefore does not propose an uncritical nostalgia for Fanon, renouncing the present and the future to reclaim a mystical past, to paraphrase his own words.18 Instead, this short book seeks to humanize Fanon—to reclaim his life and make his work immediate, as he himself sought. A historical approach is vital in this regard. Rather than Fanon being an entry point for understanding the Algerian Revolution, this book proposes the converse: the prefatory need to understand the complexities of Algeria in order to comprehend Fanon. Rather than resorting to Fanon’s work first to explain colonialism, decolonization, and a once-emergent Third Worldism, the history set forth here positions these phenomena as indispensable for situating Fanon’s ambitions. Approaching Fanon in this manner is not meant to diminish him as simply a product of his time. He defined his time. This historical technique is intended to underscore his uncanny ability to interpret the politics of the period, what was at stake, and what needed to be done.
In like fashion, this book aims to reestablish the relevance of his life and philosophy in the political present—after the wave of global decolonization that occurred during the twentieth century, after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and after the Arab Spring. At a certain level, this argument for his continued importance is at odds with Fanon’s own perspective on his life and work—a tension that emerges from time to time in his writing between fixing his ideas to a specific political horizon and casting his critical glance toward the future. “In no way is it up to me to prepare for the world coming after me,” he writes at one point in Black Skin, White Masks. “I am resolutely a man of my time.”19 In calling for a continuation of Fanon’s legacy, this book reflects this need for balance—for addressing and adhering to historical specificity, while also emulating Fanon’s own intellectual and political aspirations that were in constant search for solutions, to realize a better world.
1
Martinique
There were some who wanted to equate me with my ancestors, enslaved and lynched: I decided that I would accept this.
—Black Skin, White Masks 1
Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, on July 20, 1925. Martinique is often a cipher in many studies of Fanon, treated merely as a place of origin. But its deep history fundamentally informed his identity and shaped his ambitions. A small island of approximately 1,128 square kilometers (436 square miles) located toward the southern reaches of the Lesser Antilles near South America (see map 1.1), Martinique’s size and geography suggest a peripheral status within the French Empire. However, contrary to these surface qualities, the island experienced the firm entrenchment of French rule and influence beginning in the seventeenth century. Local indigenous societies were quickly subsumed through conquest, with European settler and enslaved African communities defining Martinique’s political and cultural life. French control took hold in a way that reflected metropolitan concerns for maintaining authority and legitimacy in a geographically distant, yet economically important, territory.
Map 1.1 The Antilles and the Caribbean.
These long-standing conditions elucidate the complex search for political