All he wanted was to be regarded as a man

July 24, 2024 12:12 AM

Readers with an intimate experience of oppression and cruelty have often responded sympathetically to Fanon’s insistence on the psychological value of violence for the colonized. In a 1969 essay, the philosopher Jean Améry, a veteran of the Belgian anti-fascist resistance and a Holocaust survivor, wrote that Fanon described a world that he knew very well from his time in Auschwitz. What Fanon understood, Améry argued, was that the violence of the oppressed is “an affirmation of dignity,” opening onto a “historical and human future.” That Fanon, who never belonged anywhere in his lifetime, has been claimed by so many as a revolutionary brother—indeed, as a universal prophet of liberation—is an achievement he might have savored. from The revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Schatz [Coda.]

An excerpt from Schatz's book The Rebel's Clinic

posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

Worth putting Fanon in context by also consulting his mentor, Aimé Césaire.
posted by gimonca at 3:27 AM on July 24 [3 favorites]

"it must be said that there is one serious omission in Shatz’s portrait: Fanon the poet and playwright, aspects of his work that make him as likely to be taught in a literature department as in Black studies or sociology" [larb]
posted by HearHere at 3:40 AM on July 24 [3 favorites]

My review of The Wretched of the Earth from when I read it in 2009 starts with “I can’t believe nobody told me to read this before.” It’s one of those paradigm-shifting books like Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, Erving Goffman’s Stigma, or Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse.
posted by larrybob at 10:05 AM on July 24 [3 favorites]