The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, it analyses the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. Showing how decolonization must be combined with building a national culture, this passionate analysis of relations between the West and the Third World is still illuminating about the world today.

“This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism”

-- Angela Davis
Have the courage to read this book -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Fanon details the impact of colonialism on the psyches of black people. For the first time, I was able to understand empire as more than just an economic phenomenon, and in turn how much Africa's decolonisation was expected to reverse. Reading it more than 50 years after publication was a visceral confrontation with a legacy that remains a shadow over black people -- Ore Ogunbiyi Guardian
In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism -- Deborah Levy Independent
The writing of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveals how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon Boston Globe
This is not so much a book as a rock thrown through the window of the West. It is the Communist Manifesto of the anticolonial revolution, and as such it is highly important for any Western reader who wants to understand the emotional force behind that revolution Time

Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961) was an author from Martinique, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.

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