The Wretched of the Earth

Introduction

Fanon dictated the book in a few months in 1961, already suffering from leukaemia; it appeared in Paris that autumn, was soon seized by the police, and he died in December. Written during the Algerian war, it analyses decolonisation in four chapters, from violence through the “pitfalls of national consciousness” – the danger that a national bourgeoisie simply replaces the colonisers – to national culture. A fifth chapter presents case studies of mental disorders among Algerians and French people caused by the colonial war, and a short conclusion calls for leaving the European model behind. Sartre’s preface sharpened the passages on violence; Hannah Arendt criticised it more than Fanon in On Violence (1970). The book was widely read in anticolonial movements.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Dialectical Reason1960 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Taken up in

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed1968 · Paulo Freire
• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature1986 · Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda2001 · Mahmood Mamdani
• Necropolitics2003 · Achille Mbembe

Criticized in

• Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?1967 · Martin Luther King Jr.

More works by Frantz Fanon

• 1952Black Skin, White Masks