The Frantz Fanon Centennial

July 20, 1925 was the date of birth of the influential anti-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon.

As should be apparent by now, I am attracted to observing these big, round anniversaries. Still, I debated marking Fanon’s here, concerned about his relevance to our usual themes. But that was easily resolved. 1) Fanon’s writings undoubtedly helped shaped the consciousness of film-makers like Jean-Luc Godard, Melvin Van Peebles, and Spike Lee, as well as countless Hip Hop artists. 2) He played a role in the critical theory movement, the very habit of mind we have adopted that causes us to question things about our preferred topics, from the role of negative stereotypes in pop culture, to the second class status of black entertainers in vaudeville. 3) there are films ABOUT Fanon. 4) In addition to medicine, psychology, and philosophy, much like Sartre, Fanon also studied literature and drama at university (Lyons), and in fact, wrote three plays for the theatre, so he was also a playwright. 5) I am in the throes of a feverish Francophilia, and that extends to interest in French history, which naturally includes negative aspects. And lastly 6): Fanon is EXTREMELY relevant to the political state of the world right now. So: asked and answered.

I first learned about Fanon in the ’90s, when I happened to be both an NYU student who took a lot of cinema studies courses (with a heavy preponderance of modern French readings assigned), and a bookseller whose purview included Black Studies. A native of the French colony of Martinique, Fanon fought for France in World War Two, which is where and how he (like many American blacks) became conscious of a certain irony in fighting against Fascists on behalf of nations that had their own racist caste systems. Fanon was, like many Francophone intellectuals of his time, influenced by Marx. His first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), based on his dissertation, was about the psychological affects of colonialism on people of color. In 1953 he went to Algeria to run a psychiatric hospital and became involved in the Algerian independence movement, while at the same time observing the effects of war and colonialism on both the oppressors and the oppressed. After he joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), he was expelled from Algeria in 1957 and went to neighboring Tunisia, which had recently gained independence. While there he wrote A Dying Colonialism (1959) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Some of his other writings were later anthologized and published posthumously. Fanon died of cancer in 1961. Algerian independence arrived the following year.

The most controversial element of Fanon’s later writing is his embrace of the tactic of violence in the struggle against colonialism. Malcolm X’s use of “by any means necessary” was likely inspired by Fanon, who may have come across it in Sartre. Fanon was influential on America’s Black Power movement, resistance to the war in Vietnam, Pan-Africanism, the anti-Apartheid movement, and the Palestinian Liberation Movement, among other things. I hope it’s obvious how he is relevant today, from MAGA’s irrational terror of the “critical race theory” bugaboo, which has placed all black studies under threat, to the ongoing horrors of the present Gaza conflict.

There are several films about Frantz Fanon, including the documentaries Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1996) by Isaac Julien, and Frantz Fanon: His Life, His Struggle, His Work (2001) by Cheikh Djemai; and the dramatized bio-pics True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956 (2024) by Abdenour Zahzah; and Fanon (2025), by Jean-Claude Barny. Also at this writing, Criterion is marking the centennial with a selection of films inspired by Fanon, including a couple of those mentioned: