The Wretched of the Earth
The Wretched of the Earth, book by West Indian psychoanalyst and social philosopher Frantz Fanon, published in French as Les Damnés de la terre in 1961 and first published in English in 1963.
Fanon’s text, written in 1960 during the Algerian War of Independence, addresses the history of colonization and the contemporary crisis of decolonization. He reflects on the psychology of the European settlers, relaying the way they entered into a process of “domination, exploitation and pillage,” under the guise of “shaping civilization.” Fanon’s critique quickly moves away from the European colonist, however, and addresses the indigenous population of colonies either fighting for independence or existing in the limbo of early decolonization. He isolates the educated and politically powerful classes of these nations for devastating attack, accusing them of possessing the “‘barely veiled desire to assimilate [themselves] to the colonial world,” and calls on the ‘Wretched’ of the title—the poorest rural classes of these countries—as being the only ones free of the colonial mindset and thus able to redeem their countries through revolution.
For Fanon, who had served in the Free French army during World War II before becoming a psychotherapist and who later worked with Algeria’s National Liberation Front, the only effective way of wrenching territory, national identity, and, most strikingly, personal sanity back from the control of the colonizers is by violence. Properly directed, violence has a cleansing effect on history and on the perpetrator, in Fanon’s theory. His text thereby becomes a justification for violence in the name of liberation and refreshes Marxist theories of revolutionary action against the immediate backdrop of freedom-fighting in the mid-20th century. As new forms of political imperialism and resistance arise, it is worth reading and testing these justifications in relation to contemporary uses and abuses of violence in world politics.
The Wretched of the Earth is, ultimately, about the use and reclaiming of history from the viewpoint of the colonized to transform thinking and action in the present and immediate future. History and culture, for Fanon, are forces for change.
