Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

Abstract

It is December 2011 and left-wing radicals and postcolonial theorists alike are commemorating the 50th anniversary of Frantz Fanon's death and the publication of his most famous and controversial book, The Wretched of the Earth. As part of the celebrations, Fanon (1925–1961) agrees to come back from the heaven of dead thinkers to do an interview with The Postcolonial Critic (PC), a 'cutting-edge IR journal'. They meet in Paris, as Fanon is keen to return to the country where he studied psychiatry and philosophy in the early 1950s, before he took up a position at a French psychiatric hospital in Algeria and ultimately joined the Front de Libération National (FLN), the Algerian resistance movement, working for their newspaper El Moudjahid and acting as their ambassador to several African countries.