Frantz Fanon
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | David Macey |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A Life |
| Publisher | Picador USA |
| Honors | |
| David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Life is an elegant and extremely accomplished biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential third world thinkers, a black man from the Caribbean who died a member of the Algerian FLN and whose violently eloquent writings inspired self-styled revolutionaries around the world. Born in Martinique, then as now a departement of France, Frantz Fanon (l925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a soldier in the Free French Army, for which… | |
David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Life is an elegant and extremely accomplished biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential third world thinkers, a black man from the Caribbean who died a member of the Algerian FLN and whose violently eloquent writings inspired self-styled revolutionaries around the world.
Born in Martinique, then as now a departement of France, Frantz Fanon (l925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a soldier in the Free French Army, for which he had volunteered and in whose ranks he saw combat during the liberation of France. In Algeria, he came into contact with the Front de Liberation National whose ruthless struggle for an independent Algeria was met with quite exceptional violence by the French Army. Fanon identified completely with the FLN and soon became a marked man. Forced to flee Algeria when he resigned his post, Fanon subsequently worked with the FLN as a propagandist and ambassador.
Based on extensive and original research, this is the most compete and objective biography of Fanon yet written. It sweeps away the myths that have grown up around him and reveals Fanon to be a complex figure, infinitely more interesting than the theorist of anti-colonial violence celebrated by the left in the 60s. Macey shows Fanon to have been a man formed in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism, and traces Fanon’s intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of post-war French culture
David Macey has done justice for the first time to the extraordinary life of a complex figure, flawed in some respects but fundamentally a humanist committed to the eradication of colonialism, a man whose angry and eloquent writings are still of fierce relevance today.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
David Macey has already established a reputation as one of the most distinguished and accessible biographers of the major figures in 20th-century French cultural life. Lacan in Contexts and The Lives of Michel Foucault have already become classics, but with Frantz Fanon: A Life, Macey has surpassed himself in producing a brilliant biography of one of the most neglected and misunderstood figures in Africa’s struggle against European colonialism. Alongside Che Guevara and Mao, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) has traditionally been seen as an “apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism. He was the horseman of a new apocalypse, the preacher of the gospel of the wretched of the earth, who were at last rising up against their oppressors”. However, as Macey skilfully argues, “there were other Frantz Fanons”. Famous for his classic books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth that angrily denounced European colonisation and racism, Fanon was a complex French-Martinican who bravely served France during World War II and went on to study psychiatry, which he practised with great distinction in Algeria in the 1950s. Fanon rapidly embraced the Algerian struggle for independence, and devoted the rest of his tragically short life to its cause (he died from leukaemia in 1961). Macey’s superb research debunks recent postcolonial assumptions about Fanon’s life, and offers a compelling account of the post-war world of colonial France and its intellectual milieu (including Fanon’s friends Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre).
This is a magnificent and deeply humane biography of a brave and principled man, of whom Macey concludes, “it is a good time to reread Fanon. Not to hear once more the call for violent revolution, but to recapture the quality of the anger that inspired it”. —Jerry Brotton
