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

Frantz Fanon’s imprint on twentieth century political philosophy and strikingly poignant role in shaping black radical traditions throughout the African Diaspora in the 1960s and 1970s is undeniable. Black activists and intellectuals found refuge in his writings, where blackness was made visible, embodied and cultivated into an epistemic resource for mapping revolutionary responses to antiblack racism, colonialism and gender and sexuality. Stokely Carmichael, the chief architect of the Black Power movement in the U.S., routinely referred to Fanon’s writing in his public speeches on Black Power, and for many others in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora Fanon’s writings were read and discussed as living scriptures. In fact, Fanon’s work, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Damned of the Earth, stirred transnational liberation movements among subjugated peoples and their political efforts to end colonialism and apartheid and segregation