Martinican-born psychiatrist, revolutionary, and the central theorist of 20th-century anti-colonial thought. Born in Fort-de-France in 1925, Fanon fought in the Free French forces in the Second World War, trained in psychiatry in Lyon, and took a post at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria in 1953 — where, as the Algerian War (1954–1962) escalated, he found himself treating both French torturers and the Algerian victims of their work. He resigned from the colonial medical service in 1956, joined the FLN, and spent his remaining five years organizing, writing, and dying of leukemia at 36. He read the proofs of his final book from his deathbed in a Maryland hospital.
Two books carry most of his weight. Black Skin, White Masks (1952), written while he was still a young doctor in France, applies phenomenology and psychoanalysis to the experience of being Black in a white colonial world, describing — in a prose that is part clinical, part lyric — the psychic damage of a racial order that demands Black people internalize a self-image formed by white eyes. The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written in a few months as he was dying, is the classic theoretical statement of anti-colonial revolution: it argues that colonialism is a system of total violence which only violence can break, that the rural peasantry rather than the urban working class is the revolutionary agent under colonial conditions, that political independence without cultural and economic decolonization will produce merely a new comprador elite, and that the liberation of the colonized requires the creation of a genuinely new humanism not continuous with Europe's. Sartre's preface introduced it to a generation of European readers.
Fanon's influence runs through the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the 1960s, through Freire's pedagogy (which he read in French), through postcolonial theory (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha), through the Black radical tradition, and through every subsequent attempt to think the psychological and political interior of colonized populations. Critics have questioned his embrace of cleansing violence; defenders have pointed out that he was describing what a specific colonial order had already made of the colonized, not prescribing it as first principle.