Frantz Fanon - Wretched of the Earth & other works (5 books)

FRANTZ FANON (1925-1961) was a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. Fanon was a political radical and an existentialist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

BLACK SKINS, WHITE MASKS (1952) is a study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

A DYING COLONIALISM (1959) is an incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order to destroy those same oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression.

Fanon’s masterwork, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (1961), is a psychiatric and psychologic analysis of the dehumanising effects of colonization upon the individual man and woman, and the nation, and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. It is here presented in two translations by Constance Farrington (1963) and Richard Philcox (2004).

Last but not least, TOWARD THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION (1964) is a powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters from 1952-1961.


The following books are in PDF format (two are also in ePUB):

* BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS (Grove, 1991 / Pluto, 2008). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, with Forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha. -- PDF + ePUB

* A DYING COLONIALISM (Grove, 1994). Translated by Haakon Chevalier, with an Introduction by Adolfo Gilly. -- PDF

* TOWARD THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION: Political Essays (Grove, 1988). Translated by Haakon Chevalier. -- PDF

* THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (Grove, 1963). Translated by Constance Farrington, with a Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. -- PDF

* THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (Grove, 2004). Translated by Richard Philcox, with a Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre and a Foreword by Homi K. Bhabha. -- PDF + ePUB