 | By Max Strasser Sunday Opinion Editor |
In the weeks after Hamas's brutal Oct. 7 attack in Israel and Israel's brutal response, as the world tried to make sense of the violence and its origins, the language of postcolonialism suddenly seemed ubiquitous, even in mainstream conversation: The terms "decolonization," "settler-colonialism" and "empire" appeared regularly not just on social media but also in newspapers and on podcasts. And it made sense that along with these words often came a name: Frantz Fanon.
Fanon is perhaps the canonical intellectual of postcolonial thought. His life intersected with many of the imperial — and post-imperial — dramas of the 20th century: He was a citizen of France, a descendant of slaves, born in the Caribbean colony of Martinique; he was a physician and a psychiatrist influenced by new ideas in psychoanalysis; he fought for France in World War II and then joined the rebellion against French rule in Algeria, where he made his name not as a guerrilla but as an author and a polemicist. His books "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth" have deeply influenced activists and thinkers since the time of their publication in the 1950s and '60s.
The writer Adam Shatz has spent years studying Fanon's life and work while writing an excellent new biography, "The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon." In a guest essay for Opinion, Shatz explains why Fanon's thought remains so relevant: because he addressed the issues that still characterize our world today — racism, global inequality, political violence, power imbalances that corrupt not just our politics but also our psyches.
But often when a writer or philosopher becomes a cultural touchstone, something is lost or flattened or misremembered, and nuances are stripped away. That's part of Shatz's argument about Fanon. Yes, he remains relevant, but he wrote books, not slogans. Shatz writes that Fanon understood the power of political violence, but he didn't heedlessly celebrate it; he recognized the depth and toxicity of racism, but he didn't subscribe to pessimistic essentialism or today's identity politics.
"It is Fanon's insistence on the struggle for freedom and dignity in the face of oppression," Shatz writes, "his belief that, one day, 'the last shall be first,' that imbues his writing with its stirring force." Fanon was a complex man and a complex thinker. He deserves to live on, Shatz believes, in all of his complexity.
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