Frantz Fanon

In class the professor told us that if we are graduating with a degree in sociology, or a college degree at all, we should be familiar with Frantz Fanon. I wasn't, so I looked him up.

Emory University has a great page that breaks down some of Fanon's works.

Black Skin, White Masks.

"Fanon's personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as psychology . . . Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the black man" (english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html).

"Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, 'black.' Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest" (english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html).

The Wretched of the Earth

"In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon develops the Manichean perspective implicit in BSWM. To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total revolution, "absolute violence" (37). Violence purifies, destroying not only the category of white, but that of black too. According to Fanon, true revolution in Africa can only come from the peasants, or "fellaheen." Putting peasants at the vanguard of the revolution reveals the influence of the FLN, who based their operations in the countryside, on Fanon's thinking. Furthermore, this emphasis on the rural underclass highlights Fanon's disgust with the greed and politicking of the comprador bourgeoisie in new African nations. The brand of nationalism espoused by these classes, and even by the urban proletariat, is insufficient for total revolution because such classes benefit from the economic structures of imperialism. Fanon claims that non-agrarian revolutions end when urban classes consolidate their own power, without remaking the entire system" (english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html).