Frantz Fanon: A Biography Book

David Macey has already established a reputation as one of the most distinguished and accessible biographers of the major figures in 20th-century French cultural life. Lacan in Contexts and The Lives of Michel Foucault have already become classics, but with Frantz Fanon: A Life, Macey has surpassed himself in producing a brilliant biography of one of the most neglected and misunderstood figures in Africa's struggle against European colonialism. Alongside Che Guevara and Mao, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) has traditionally been seen as an "apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism. He was the horseman of a new apocalypse, the preacher of the gospel of the wretched of the earth, who were at last rising up against their oppressors". However, as Macey skilfully argues, "there were other Frantz Fanons". Famous for his classic books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth that angrily denounced European colonisation and racism, Fanon was a complex French-Martinican who bravely served France during World War II and went on to study psychiatry, which he practised with great distinction in Algeria in the 1950s. Fanon rapidly embraced the Algerian struggle for independence, and devoted the rest of his tragically short life to its cause (he died from leukaemia in 1961). Macey's superb research debunks recent postcolonial assumptions about Fanon's life, and offers a compelling account of the post-war world of colonial France and its intellectual milieu (including Fanon's friends Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre).This is a magnificent and deeply humane biography of a brave and principled man, of whom Macey concludes, "it is a good time to reread Fanon. Not to hear once more the call for violent revolution, but to recapture the quality of the anger that inspired it". --Jerry BrottonRead More