The colonial world keeps the colonized individual continually on edge with their muscles tensed in violent anticipation. Fanon refers to the colonial world as “a Manichaean World” that is divided into light and dark, in which the white colonizers are seen as the light, and the black colonized individuals are viewed as darkness and the epitome of evil.
The colonial world is divided by military barracks and police stations, and it constitutes two very different spaces: the colonists’ world is impeccably maintained with modern convinces and opportunity, whereas the world of the colonized is “a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people,” which is saddled with poverty, famine, and illiteracy.
The colonists took control of the colonized through violent means with military tanks and rifles with bayonets, and they maintain control in the very same way. Decolonization cannot occur with merely a “gentleman’s agreement,” as colonialism itself is steeped in violence. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.The Wretched of the Earth begins with Frantz Fanon’s explanation of violence within the “colonial situation.” According to Fanon, the act of decolonization will always involve violence. 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.įanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.
A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.
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