The Psychiatric Writings From Alienation And Freedom

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon's entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.

Frantz Fanon's psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. The writing collected here was written from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work and reveals much about how Fanon's thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle. His political, revolutionary and literary lives should not then be separated from the psychiatric practice and writings that shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.

The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his psychiatric work still has only been studied peripherally. That is in part because most of his psychiatric writings have remained untranslated. With a focus on Fanon’s key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon’s psychiatic writings as materials anticipating as well as accompanying Fanon’s better known work, written between 1952 and 1961 (Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth). Both clinical and political, they draw on another notion of psychiatry that intersects history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The authors argue that Fanon’s work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry based on a new concept of culture (anchored to historical events, particular situations, and lived experience) and on the relationship between the psychological and the cultural. Thus, Gibson and Beneduce contend that Fanon’s psychiatric writings also express Fanon’s wish, as he puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, to “develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity.”

Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory: A View from the Wretched, is a collection of essays engaged in a future-oriented remembrance of the emancipatory work of one of the most influential revolutionary social theorists: Frantz Fanon.

Frantz Fanon is a key figure in postcolonial and cultural studies. Born in 1925 on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, he passionately identified with Algeria's struggle for independence against the French. He became the leading voice in black liberationist writing. With the publication of this book, it is now possible to access all his important writings in one source.The Fanon Reader features extracts from each of Fanon's major works including Black Skin, White Masks, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution and The Wretched of the Earth. Haddour contextualises Fanon -- the man and his work -- and provides a comprehensive summary of critical perspectives on his writings.This fully rounded critical introduction to Fanon's work will appeal to students and teachers in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, literary theory, race studies and anyone interested in the life and writings of one of the world's foremost pioneers of black liberation.

The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon’s writings. As a philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its facets. Change is the thread that ties together his critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and his intellectual exchange with Césaire, Kojève, and Sartre. It informs his analysis of racism and colonialism, négritude and the veil, language and culture, disalienation and decolonization, and it underpins his reflections on Martinique, Algeria, the Caribbean, Africa, the Third World, and the world at large. Gavin Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon’s work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. Arnall offers close readings of Fanon’s entire oeuvre, from canonical works like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands. Speaking both to scholars and to the continued vitality of Fanon’s ideas among today’s social movements, this book offers a rigorous and profoundly original engagement with Fanon that affirms his importance in the effort to bring about radical change.

Given the continuing relevance of Fanon's insights into the enduring legacy of colonialism on the psyches of the colonised, this compelling and personal account of his life will be required reading for anyone interested in the consequences of empire.

Frantz Fanon's political impact is difficult to overestimate. His anti-colonialist, philosophical and revolutionary writings were among the most influential of the 20th century. The essays, articles and notes published in this volume cover the most politically active period of his life and encapsulate the breadth, depth and urgency of his writings. In particular, they clarify and amplify his much-debated views on violent resistance. These works provide new complexity to our understanding of Fanon and reveal just how relevant his thinking is to the contemporary world and how important his ideas are to changing it.

Prior to becoming a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon wanted to be a playwright and his interest in dialogue, dramatisation and metaphor continued throughout his writing and career. His passion for theatre developed during the years that he was studying medicine, and in 1949 he wrote the plays The Drowning Eye (L'Œil se noie), and Parallel Hands (Les Mains parallèles). This first English translation of the works gives us a Fanon at his most lyrical, experimental and provocative.