The shock of the new, in political life, often sends us back to the past in search of an intellectual compass. Amid the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsanaro and other authoritarian leaders, Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, enjoyed a surge of attention, and Arendt herself acquired a prophet-like status among liberals seeking to understand how their world had gone so wrong. The threat of illiberal nationalism hasn’t faded — on the contrary — but in an age consumed with racism, police violence and the legacy of European colonialism in the Middle East and Africa, Arendt’s popularity is increasingly rivaled by that of a man she both sharply criticized and grudgingly admired: Frantz Fanon.
Fanon, a psychiatrist, writer, and anticolonial militant, who grew up in a middle-class Black family in French colonial Martinique, was not merely a thinker; he was a political theoretician, a fiery spokesman for Algeria’s independence movement, the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.), which he joined while working as a psychiatrist in Blida, on the outskirts of Algiers. He captured, as no other writer of his time did, the fury engendered by colonial humiliation in the hearts of the colonized. He was also a startlingly prescient analyst of contemporary ills — the enduring psychological injuries of racism and oppression, the persistent force of white nationalism and the scourge of autocratic, predatory postcolonial regimes.
Fanon wrote at the height of the Cold War, but, with no less prescience, he regarded the East-West struggle as a passing sideshow, of far less consequence than the divisions between North and South, of the rich world and the poor world. If the colonial world was, in his words, “a world cut in two,” our postcolonial world seems scarcely less so. Just consider the starkly different responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — or South Africa’s case against Israel, on the charge of genocide — in the global north and the global south.
Much of the writing Fanon produced in his short lifetime — he died at 36, of leukemia — was in the form either of psychiatric studies or propaganda dashed off for the purpose of revolutionary instruction. It gives off the heat of battles that haven’t ended, battles over colonialism and racial injustice. Not surprisingly, Fanon’s name has been invoked in discussions of everything from the precariousness of Black lives to the campaign to repatriate African art objects, from the refugee crisis to Hamas’s murderous attack on Oct. 7. It’s not as if his work ever vanished. But it hasn’t been cited with such frequency or urgency since the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers, Palestinian guerrillas and Latin American revolutionaries pored over copies of “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon’s 1961 anticolonial manifesto.
Back then, Fanon was a minor celebrity on the radical left. Today he is an icon, enlisted on behalf of a range of often wildly contradictory agendas: Black nationalist and cosmopolitan, secular and Islamist, identitarian and anti-identitarian. He’s the subject of two forthcoming biopics, and “The Wretched of the Earth” even shows up as a prop in an episode of “The White Lotus.” Left-wing artists, academics, activists and therapists hungrily rummage through his writings for catchphrases (and there are many) about the psychological effects of white domination, racist misrepresentations of the Black body, the meaning of the Muslim head scarf, the anger of the colonized and the exhibitionist violence of imperial powers. But the far right has also had a longstanding fascination with his work: both the writer Renaud Camus and the French politician Éric Zemmour, proponents of the racist Great Replacement theory, are readers of Fanon.
After the murder of George Floyd, protesters held up banners quoting Fanon’s observation in “Black Skin, White Masks,” a study of racism published in 1952 when he was 27 years old, that the oppressed revolt when they can no longer breathe. Since Oct. 7, he has been celebrated by pro-Palestinian students — and denounced by their critics — for his defense of violence by the colonized in the first chapter of “The Wretched of the Earth.” What Fanon’s contemporary admirers and detractors have in common is that many, if not most, of them appear not to have read past the first chapter, portraying this complex and challenging thinker as little more than a supporter of revolutionary violence by any means necessary — a Malcolm X for the French-speaking world. Or, more precisely, the caricature to which Malcolm X, like so many Black revolutionaries, has been reduced.
New York Times
