The Wretched of the Earth

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanons masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Saids Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of postindependence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. Fanons analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.

“This century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.” Angela Davis

“Have the courage to read this book." Jean-Paul Sartre

“The writing of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveals how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon." The Boston Globe

 

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. During World War II Fanon enlisted in the French army and was initially sent with allied forces to Casablanca, Morocco, yet was transferred to France where he fought and was wounded in the battle at Colmar, in northern France. After the war Fanon studied medicine in France, where he specialized in psychiatry. It was while studying in France that Fanon wrote his first book, entitled Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a study of the black subjugation in the western white world.