What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought

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.

About the Author :
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Universit� Toulouse Jean Jaur�s, France; and Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. His books include Existentia Africana; Disciplinary Decadence; An Introduction to Africana Philosophy; and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age.

Review :
"What Fanon Said is well researched and stages a very complex dialogue with existing scholarship on Fanon. Professor Lewis Gordon's vast intellectual/academic knowledge allows us to read Fanon in new and different ways: Lewis Gordon contextualizes Fanon's thought in a wide arch of knowledge--from St Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy through Fanon's contemporary interlocutors such as Simone De Beauvoir and J. P. Sartre, L. S. Senghor, etc., through to more recent continental philosophers such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Along the way Professor Gordon also incorporates the relevant debates from contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon Said is a provocative and illuminating study of Fanon's work and it will have a significant impact on contemporary debates about Fanon."--Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley "As a careful and systematic analysis of the major controversies that have surrounded the works of Frantz Fanon, this book is a must read. Lewis Gordon delivers on his promise of boldly examining these controversies while at the same time providing a very spirited defense of many of Fanon's positions. What Fanon Said is now the most comprehensive treatment of the many and ever so intense polemics arising out of Fanon's works that continue to be fiercely debated."--Paget Henry, Brown University As a careful and systematic analysis of the major controversies that have surrounded Fanon, this book is a must read. Lewis Gordon delivers on his promise of boldly examining these controversies while providing a spirited defense of many of Fanon s positions. -Paget Henry, Brown University "In the hands of Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said, becomes what Frantz Fanon says to us today. The book brings alive the revolutionary thought and practice of Fanon into the continuing struggles for structural economic, political, social, and psychic transformations of our world. The struggle against anti-black racism is an integral part of it, and Gordon's Fanon is the many-sided thinker who saw it all and give it words of fire in his works, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and The Damned of the Earth."--Ngugi wa Thiong'o, auhor of Wizard of the Crow, from the Wits University Press edition "Gordon has contextualised Fanon's words in an impressive analysis of his texts in relation to other thinkers and critics."-Socialist Review "Gordon is interested in understanding and correcting the systematic delegitimization of black intellectuals, both in philosophy and within the broader scope of theory...This is how Gordon pertinently introduces considerations of race and racism within the epistemological field, engaging his readers to be more perceptive with regard to what could be called a 'colour line in theory'."--Lucy Kim-Chi Mercier, Radical Philosophy