Politics

Frantz Fanon

1925 to 1961, Fort-de-France, Martinique

How colonialism wounds the mind as well as the body - the epidermal shame of the white gaze, the psychology of decolonization, and the call to invent a new humanism.

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Lessons

The Lived Experience of the Black Man

Fanon’s phenomenology of racism in Black Skin, White Masks : how the white gaze fixes the black man from outside, shatters his sense of his own body, and replaces his ordinary body-image with a ‘racial epide…

The Colonized Mind and the White Mask

How colonialism manufactures an inferiority complex in its subjects - teaching them to despise their own language, culture, and body, and to reach for a ‘white mask’ they can never quite wear - and why, for…

Violence and Decolonization

The most controversial argument in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth : that colonialism is founded and held in place by violence, and that its undoing therefore involves violence - which, at the level of the indiv…

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness

Fanon’s prophetic warning, written as empires were falling, that formal independence is not liberation - that a self-serving national middle class can simply step into the departed colonizer’s shoes, betray…

A New Humanism

The closing vision of The Wretched of the Earth : Fanon’s call to ‘leave this Europe’ - which preaches humanity while murdering it - and to ‘work out new concepts’ and ‘set afoot a ne…

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