The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox (Translator), Homi K. Bhabha (Foreword by), Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface by)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A monumental work that has transcended from the time it was first published (1961) to the modern day, The Wretched of the Earth is essential reading on race, colonialism and the like. It's a cornerstone text among modern activists that has lost none of its relevance and impact.

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. Fanon’s masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said’s 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. Fanon’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802141323
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He served in the French Army during World War II, and later studied medicine and psychiatry in France, where he published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. He joined the Algerian Nationalist Movement in the mid-1950s, and published The Wretched of the Earth shortly before dying of leukemia in December 1961.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Sixtieth Anniversary Edition Cornel West vii

Foreword: Framing Fanon Homi K. Bhabha xiii

Preface Jean-Paul Sartre xlix

I On Violence 1

On Violence in the International Context 52

II Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity 63

III The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness 97

IV On National Culture 145

Mutual Foundations for National Culture and Liberation Struggled 170

V Colonial War and Mental Disorders 181

Series A 185

Series B 199

Series C 207

Series D 216

From the North African's Criminal Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation 219

Conclusion 235

On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice Richard Philcox 241

Editorial Reviews

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.

Sacred Fire

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

From the Publisher