But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists.ĭecolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded. In actual fact, proof of success lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out. What is singularly important is that it starts from the very first day with the basic claims of the colonized. ![]() But instead we have decided to describe the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization. We could go on to portray the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless. At whatever level we study it-individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank-decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another. National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. Fanon forces his readers to see the Algerian revolution-and by analogy other contemporary revolutions-from the viewpoint of the rebels.”- Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Nation “The value of The Wretched of the Earth in its relation to direct experience, in the perspective of the Algerian revolution. “This century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.”- Angela Davis “Have the courage to read this book.”- Jean-Paul Sartre “The writing of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveals how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon.”- The Boston Globe Sixty years after its publication, The Wretched of the Earth reads increasingly like a dying Black man’s admission of a genuine impossibility: of moving beyond the world made by white men.”- Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker One measure of Fanon’s clairvoyance-and the glacial pace of progress-is that, in its sixtieth year, The Wretched of the Earth remains a vital guide both to the tenacity of white supremacy in the West and to the moral and intellectual failures of the ‘darker nations’. ![]() “Certainly, writers of the sixties inspired by The Wretched of the Earth -the African novelists Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese critic Walter Rodney-saw in the book not an incitement to kill white people but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the post-colonial condition: how the West would seek to maintain the iniquitous international order that had made it rich and powerful, and how new ruling classes in post-colonial nations would fail to devise a viable system of their own. 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. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel Westįirst 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 masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization.Ī 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.
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