Frantz Fanon has influenced generations of activists and scholars. His life's work continues to be debated and discussed around the world. This book is an event: an international, interdisciplinary collection of debates and interventions by leading scholars and intellectuals from Africa, Europe and the United States.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of “living thought” against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon’s writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

The short, but remarkable, life of Frantz Fanon has attracted several biographers, all of whom have relied on Fanon’s older brother, Joby, for information on Fanon’s early life. Dissatisfied with these portrayals, Joby decided to tell the story of his brother in his own words with a richness of detail not found in any other work. Translated into English by Daniel Nethery, this is an intimate, passionate, and very human account of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Frantz Fanon stands as one of the most uncompromising critics of racism and colonialism. His experience growing up as French colonial subject taught him to be fearless in the defense of his ideals. At the age of seventeen he left his home island of Martinique to fight in Europe against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied medicine and wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. He practiced as a psychiatrist in Algeria and put his medical skills and literary talent in the service of the struggle for Algerian independence and African liberation. He died in 1961, one week after the publication of his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. He was thirty-six years old.

This book focuses on a reading of Frantz Fanon’s work and life, asking how the work of a revolutionary writer such as Fanon might be best appropriated for contemporary political and cultural issues. Separate chapters introduce Fanon’s life and examine the question of Fanon as our contemporary; review the field of “Fanon studies” that has grown up around his work; bring Fanon into conversation with the critical contemporary figures Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy; and turn to Fanon’s work to think through the contemporary popular uprisings that have come to be known as the “Arab Spring.” The book concludes by arguing that a reevaluation of Fanon’s life and work can provide us with a particular set of lessons about solidarity—lessons that are crucial for the contemporary political struggles that face us today and that will continue to confront us in the future. Finding Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics is inspired by Fanon’s unsparing struggle against the depredations of racism and colonialism, and his lifelong commitment to finding something different.

"Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose hugely influential books--including Black skin, white masks--have informed a wide range of studies, and inspired revolutionary movements from Palestine to Sri Lanka and South Africa. Frantz Fanon: philosopher of the barricades is a critical biography of his extraordinary life and work. Peter Hudis draws on his entire story--from his upbringing in Martinique to his mature efforts to fuse psychoanalysis with philosophy--to show that Fanon's writing speaks directly to today's struggles against racism and alienation."--Back cover.

The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel West First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

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.”