Frantz Fanon: (Critical Lives)

Doctor, militant, political essayist, teacher, journalist, diplomat, pan-Africanist: Frantz Fanon represented a new model of multi-engaged intellectual who sought to decolonize mid-twentieth-century thought, society and culture and move beyond the ideology of race. Born Black in colonial Martinique, he fought for France during the Second World War but later renounced his native land and aspired to be Algerian during the Algerian War of Independence. Foregrounding Fanon’s gift for self-invention and performance, James S. Williams charts the major turning points in the short, extraordinary life of this visionary figure, and reveals how Fanon’s pioneering work in psychiatry influenced his revolutionary writing and philosophy.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations Introduction: Fanon: Doctor, Writer, Revolutionary 1 More French than French: Boyhood on a Colonial Island 2 Fighting for the Republic: From Dissidence to Combat 3 Return to the Native Land: With and Against Césaire 4 The Voyage In: Love and Loathing in Lyon 5 Getting Under the Colonial Skin, Leaping Out of History 6 Socialtherapy: The Breakthrough of Saint-Alban 7 Blida: Where Medicine Meets War 8 Public Acts of Provocation: Fanon in Performance 9 My Name is Ibrahim: Exile in Tunis 10 Lifting the Veil/Preaching Revolution 11 Accra, Pan-Africanism and the Southern Front 12 Down to the Wire: The Damned Reborn 13 The Final Crossing 14 Fanon’s After-Lives References Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements

About the Author :
James S. Williams is professor of modern French literature and film at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of several books, including Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty.

Review :
Williams gives us an account of the life and ideas of its protagonist that is sharply focused and wise. Frantz Fanon was a phenomenon, as this new biography sets out to explain . . . Williams’s biography recognises Fanon’s shortcomings, including his personal shortcomings, as well as appreciating his extraordinary achievements . . . these details do have relevance, illustrating the ways in which his understanding of racism and its insidious effects were shaped, along with his thinking on transformative change. This book is, in other words, an encouragement to read Fanon for ourselves. In this carefully focused book, Williams achieves his aim of demythologizing many engrained understandings of Fanon. Drawing on a broad range of his subject’s writings, and locating these in complex biographical and historical contexts, he offers an invaluable account of Fanon’s contribution to anti-colonial and pan-African thought, and to a still urgent critique of the ideologies of race and identity. Elegantly succinct yet deeply informed, Williams’s authoritative account of Fanon’s life and thought is a superb book. With great clarity, Williams finely captures the ambiguities, paradoxes and opacities of Fanon’s work and personality, in a style that is not afraid to offer critical distance through parenthetic comments or to include speculative elements that make us think. Generous in his engagement with Fanonian scholarship, Williams never leans upon it and offers a clear voice and perspective that brings us through Fanon’s life and onwards into his after-lives. A pleasure to read, this book is an impressive and confident scholarly achievement.