THE REBEL'S CLINIC

A closely argued study of the life and work of the iconic leftist thinker.

Like Albert Camus, a near contemporary, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) took a nuanced view of revolutionary struggles in colonial nations. Born in Martinique, a French colony, Fanon grew up in comparatively comfortable surroundings as a son of middle-class parents. After serving with distinction during World War II, Fanon studied philosophy and psychiatry in France. Afterward, writes Shatz, U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, he developed critically important insights into the psychology of the oppressed. At the same time, Fanon worked with French soldiers who had tortured civilians during the long colonial war in Algeria, finding the same complex of maladies: “What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul.” Fanon was definitively on the side of the Algerians, idealizing their revolution but overlooking in the death of colonialism the emergence of an Islamist society that “ensured the dominance of religious populism.” He was similarly disheartened by the dominance of strongman governments in newly independent African colonies, even as he argued that Europe’s time was over, while “an Africa to come” was emerging from the colonial shadows. In books such as The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon furthered his anticolonial opposition to both Europe and the U.S., the latter of which provided him treatment for the cancer that would kill him, treatment that was ironically courtesy of none other than the CIA. The author effectively shows how Fanon is far more influential now than he was during his life, and not without some irony there, too: Exponents of so-called replacement theory, for instance, trace their movement to “Fanon’s observations about the desire of the colonized to take the place of their colonizers.”

A useful, readable adjunct to anyone studying Fanon’s life and work.