In his talk, Adam Shatz presented an admiring yet tragic portrait of the Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the author of such works as Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Raised in Fort-de-France and educated in Lyon after receiving a Croix de Guerre for his service in the Free French Forces, Fanon became the director of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in French-ruled Algeria. There he began to offer his assistance to the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, which launched a war of independence against France on November 1, 1954. Fanon fled Blida for Paris in late 1956, and then made his way to Tunis, where he became a spokesman for the FLN, and, later, a traveling ambassador for the exiled government of revolutionary Algeria.
After his death from leukemia in December 1961, less than a year before Algeria achieved independence, Fanon emerged as one of the most influential theorists of decolonization–and as a controversial one, too, because of his defense of violence as a kind of shock therapy, freeing the colonized from despair and passivity. He was embraced by the Black Panthers, the Palestinian national liberation movement, and by the revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah, some of whom interpreted Fanon, a West Indian atheist, as an Islamist thinker. Shatz’s forthcoming book, The Rebel's Clinic, provides a chronological account of Fanon's life; but its larger purpose is to show how Fanon's ideas about racism, mental illness, colonialism, nationalism, and violence took shape against the backdrop of what Sartre called "extreme situation": the Second World War, the Algerian war of independence, the plot against Lumumba, and the often violent conflicts within the FLN.
Adam Shatz is a contributing editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, amongst other publications.
Ayşe Çağlar, IWM Permanent Fellow, provided commentary and moderated the discussion.
