But if violence was a tool of social control, it may also, argued Fanon, be a cathartic reaction to the oppression of colonialism and a necessary tool of political engagement. He saw violence as the defining characteristic of colonialism. The publication shortly before his death of his book Les Damnés de la terre (1961 The Wretched of the Earth) established Fanon as a leading intellectual in the international decolonization movement the preface to his book was written by Jean-Paul Sartre.įanon perceived colonialism as a form of domination whose necessary goal for success was the reordering of the world of indigenous ("native") peoples. Integrating psychoanalysis, phenomenology, existentialism, and Négritude theory, Fanon articulated an expansive view of the psychosocial repercussions of colonialism on colonized people.
In 1961 he received treatment for the disease in the United States, where he later died.įanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952 Black Skin, White Masks) is a multidisciplinary analysis of the effect of colonialism on racial consciousness. That same year Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. In 1960 he was appointed ambassador to Ghana by Algeria’s FLN-led provisional government. He began working with the Algerian liberation movement, the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale FLN), and in 1956 became an editor of its newspaper, El Moudjahid, published in Tunis. While treating Algerians and French soldiers, Fanon began to observe the effects of colonial violence on the human psyche. In 1953-1956 he served as head of the psychiatry department of Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, which was then part of France.
After attending schools in Martinique, Fanon served in the Free French Army during World War II and afterward attended school in France, completing his studies in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon.