77 Facts About Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon's works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.

Frantz Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time".

For more than five decades, the life and works of Frantz Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.

Frantz Fanon formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care.

Frantz Fanon helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is a French single territorial collectivity.

Frantz Fanon's father, Felix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves, and worked as a customs agent.

Frantz Fanon was the third of four sons in a family of eight children.

Two of them died young, including his sister Gabrielle, with whom Frantz Fanon was very close.

Frantz Fanon left Martinique in 1943, when he was 18 years old, in order to join the Free French forces.

The abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Frantz Fanon, reinforcing his feelings of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism.

At the age of seventeen, Frantz Fanon fled the island as a "dissident", traveling to Dominica to join the Free French Forces.

Frantz Fanon enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that reached Casablanca.

Frantz Fanon was later transferred to an army base at Bejaia on the Kabylia coast of Algeria.

Frantz Fanon left Algeria from Oran and served in France, notably in the battles of Alsace.

Frantz Fanon worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor Aime Cesaire, who would be a major influence in his life.

Frantz Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry.

Frantz Fanon was educated in Lyon, where he studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures.

In 1948 Frantz Fanon started a relationship with Michelle, a medical student, who soon became pregnant.

Frantz Fanon left her for an 18-year-old high school student, Josie, whom he married in 1952.

In France while completing his residency, Frantz Fanon wrote and published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people.

Originally, the manuscript was the doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon, entitled "Essay on the Disalienation of the Black", which was a response to the racism that Frantz Fanon experienced while studying psychiatry and medicine at university in Lyon; the rejection of the dissertation prompted Frantz Fanon to publish it as a book.

Later, Jeanson learned that his response had earned him the writer's lifelong respect, and Frantz Fanon acceded to Jeanson's suggestion that the book be entitled Black Skin, White Masks.

Frantz Fanon believed that even though they could speak French, they could not fully integrate into the life and environment of white people.

Frantz Fanon was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria.

Frantz Fanon worked there until his deportation in January 1957.

Frantz Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabylia region, to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians.

Frantz Fanon's lost study of "The marabout of Si Slimane" is an example.

Shortly afterwards, Frantz Fanon was expelled from Algeria and moved to Tunis where he joined the FLN openly.

Frantz Fanon was part of the editorial collective of Al Moudjahid, for which he wrote until the end of his life.

Frantz Fanon served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government.

Frantz Fanon attended conferences in Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo and Tripoli.

Frantz Fanon went to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced some remission of his illness.

Frantz Fanon traveled to Rome for a three-day meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre who had greatly influenced his work.

Frantz Fanon subsequently died from double pneumonia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961 after finally having begun his leukemia treatment.

Frantz Fanon was buried in Algeria after lying in state in Tunisia.

Frantz Fanon was survived by his French wife, Josie, their son, Olivier Fanon, and his daughter from a previous relationship, Mireille Fanon-Mendes France.

Frantz Fanon says that the black man has two dimensions: One with his fellows, the other with the white man.

Frantz Fanon claimed that whether this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question.

Frantz Fanon wants above all to be with a white man, and strives to be as close to communities of white people as possible.

Frantz Fanon discusses how mulatto women see themselves as superior to black men.

Frantz Fanon is a part of the social and cultural elite and falls in love with a white woman.

Towards the end of the chapter, Frantz Fanon emphasizes the lack of generalizability for the findings on Jean Veneuse to the experiences of all black men in France, as the course of his development to a great extent is part of his personality type.

Frantz Fanon criticizes the implication that this inferiority complex is innate in the colonized, and argues for the effect of human attitudes.

Frantz Fanon says that because Blackness was created in, and continues to exist in, negation to whiteness, that ontology is not a philosophy that can be used to understand the Black experience.

Frantz Fanon argues that a black man has to be black, while being black in relation to the white man.

Frantz Fanon makes it clear that the treatment of Black people causes emotional trauma.

Frantz Fanon argues that as a result of one's skin color being Black, Black people are unable to truly process this trauma or "make it unconscious".

Frantz Fanon discusses the mental health of Black people to show that "traditional" psychology was created and founded without thinking about Black people and their experiences.

Frantz Fanon is best known for the classic analysis of colonialism and decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth.

Frantz Fanon claims that decolonization is inherently a violent process, because the relationship between the settler and the native is a binary of opposites.

Frantz Fanon uses the Jewish people to explain how the prejudice expressed towards blacks can not be generalized to other races or ethnicities.

Frantz Fanon discusses this in Black Skin, White Masks, and pulls from Jean-Paul Sartre's Reflections on the Jewish Question to inform his understanding of French colonialism's relationship with the Jewish people and how it can be compared and contrasted with the oppressions of Blacks across the world.

Frantz Fanon argues that the reasons for hating "The Jew" are born from a different fear than those for hating Blacks.

Frantz Fanon navigates the lived experiences of the black subject by drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis, literary texts, medical terminology, philosophy, negritude, and political consciousness.

Frantz Fanon placed emphasis on the concepts of Political Consciousness and Negritude in the navigation of the experiences of black subjects.

Frantz Fanon used the concept of political consciousness to show that the field of psychological phenomena, and the experiences of the black individual, always deserve a political level of analysis.

Frantz Fanon is aware that the colonised individual accepts art of their white -scripted history and in some ways actively participate in it.

Frantz Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression.

In defence of the use of violence by colonized peoples, Frantz Fanon argued that human beings who are not considered as such shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity in their attitude towards the colonizer.

An often overlooked aspect of Frantz Fanon's work is that he did not like to physically write his pieces.

Frantz Fanon expresses in this chapter that freedom can not be achieved if violence is not a part of the process.

Frantz Fanon made this claim by arguing that the nature of colonisation was violent, in the way that black individuals were stripped of their land and treated as lesser people, so the retaliation for achieving freedom needed to be violent.

Frantz Fanon argued that for colonisers to expect the colonised to achieve freedom through peaceful means was a double standard.

Frantz Fanon continued to argue that there were two types of violence in a colonial setting.

Frantz Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lacan, Negritude, and Marxism.

Frantz Fanon was first introduced to Negritude during his lycee days in Martinique when Cesaire coined the term and presented his ideas in Tropiques, the journal that he edited with Suzanne Cesaire, his wife, in addition to his classic Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.

Frantz Fanon quoted, for example, his teacher at length in "The Lived Experience of the Black Man", a heavily anthologized essay from Black Skins, White Masks.

Frantz Fanon has had an influence on anti-colonial and national liberation movements.

The Black Power group that Frantz Fanon had the most influence on was the Black Panther Party.

The Panther 10 Point Plan contained 6 points which either directly or indirectly referenced ideas in Frantz Fanon's work including their contention that there must be an end to the "robbery by the white man", and "education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society".

In 2015 Raul Zibechi argued that Frantz Fanon had become a key figure for the Latin American left.

Frantz Fanon's influence extended to the liberation movements of the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others.

Frantz Fanon's work was a key influence on the Black Panther Party, particularly his ideas concerning nationalism, violence and the lumpenproletariat.

Frantz Fanon's work was a key influence on Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, as well.

Frantz Fanon's work serves as an important theoretical gloss for writers including Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Senegal's Ken Bugul and Ousmane Sembene, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Frantz Fanon's legacy has expanded even further into Black Studies and more specifically, into the theories of Afro-pessimism and Black Critical Theory.