Sacred Fire
Frantz Fanon's influence on the thinking of the proponents of black power has been enormous. One finds references to his ideas in the works of authors such as Maulana Karenga, James H. Cone, and James Forman. An explanation for this can be found in the timeliness of his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth.
According to William L. Van Deburg,
... the ideological underpinnings of the Black Power movement owed a great deal to the conceptualizations of Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinique who had joined a career as physician/scholar with that of a political militant in service of the Algerian revolution. Fanon, whose work, The Wretched of the Earth was published (just before his death) provided black American activists with a compelling analysis of the consciousness and situation of "colonized" peoples everywhere. Chief among his teachings was that violence in support of political and cultural liberation was a positive force, one that was both psychologically empowering and tactically sound. Forceful opposition to an oppressive regime was said to reaffirm the humanity of the oppressed, allowing them to "experience themselves as men."
Armed with this wisdom, mid-sixties activist intellectuals began to speak of African America as an internal colony at war with the forces of cultural degradation and assimilation. By adopting variants of Fanon's concepts, rank-and-file Black Power militants were able to identify with the colonized of the Third World even as they affirmed the notion that violent acts could lead to both mental catharsis and meaningful political change.
From the Publisher
Praise for The Wretched of the Earth
“Certainly, writers of the sixties inspired by The Wretched of the Earth—the African novelists Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese critic Walter Rodney—saw in the book not an incitement to kill white people but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the post-colonial condition: how the West would seek to maintain the iniquitous international order that had made it rich and powerful, and how new ruling classes in post-colonial nations would fail to devise a viable system of their own. One measure of Fanon’s clairvoyance—and the glacial pace of progress—is that, in its sixtieth year, The Wretched of the Earth remains a vital guide both to the tenacity of white supremacy in the West and to the moral and intellectual failures of the ‘darker nations’ . . . Sixty years after its publication, The Wretched of the Earth reads increasingly like a dying Black man’s admission of a genuine impossibility: of moving beyond the world made by white men.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker
“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.”—Boston Globe
“Have the courage to read this book.”—Jean-Paul Sartre
“This century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.”—Angela Davis
“The value of The Wretched of the Earth [lies] in its relation to direct experience, in the perspective of the Algerian revolution . . . Fanon forces his readers to see the Algerian revolution—and by analogy other contemporary revolutions—from the viewpoint of the rebels.”—Conor Cruise O’Brien, Nation
“The Wretched of the Earth is an explosion.”—Emile Capouya, Saturday Review
