A Fanonian Summer

This short essay is a reflection by Claire Chambers about what the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon has meant to her during a career as a postcolonial scholar, and in one ‘Fanonian summer’ in particular—in the volatile and manichaean year of 2016. The article takes as its point of departure revelations about Fanon’s life yielded by two texts: David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography and Jean Khalifa and Robert Young’s Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté. It then moves into discussion of the philosopher’s radical legacy for anti-racism and postcolonial studies through readings of three of his works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and A Dying Colonialism (1959). Chambers considers Fanon’s psychiatric work and activism for the National Liberation Front or FLN during the Algerian War of Independence (1954−1962), as well as his gender politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that never has Fanon’s work been more relevant to postcolonial thought than in our divided, violent late 2010s.