African Political Thought · Unit 6
Fanon: Violence, Psychology, and Liberation
A psychiatrist who treated colonial torturers by day, joined the resistance by night, and built a theory of decolonization out of what he saw in both roles
This unit examines Frantz Fanon's full body of thought, from Black Skin, White Masks' analysis of how colonization inscribes racial inferiority directly onto the colonized person's own sense of self, through his practical psychiatric work at Algeria's Blida-Joinville hospital treating both French torturers and their Algerian victims, to The Wretched of the Earth's controversial argument that violence is a necessary, even psychologically restorative, feature of decolonization, and his final warning about the specific ways newly independent African nations could betray the liberation they had just won.
Learning Objectives
- •Students will be able to explain Fanon's concept of 'epidermalization' from Black Skin, White Masks and analyze the specific childhood episode he uses to illustrate how racial inferiority becomes inscribed onto the colonized person's own body and self-perception.
- •Students will analyze Fanon's psychiatric practice at Blida-Joinville Hospital, including his documented treatment of both French torturers and Algerian torture victims, and evaluate how this clinical work shaped his theoretical arguments.
- •Students will evaluate Fanon's central and controversial claim in The Wretched of the Earth that violence functions as a necessary and psychologically restorative component of decolonization, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre's supportive but complicating preface.
- •Students will explain Fanon's warning about 'the pitfalls of national consciousness' and connect it directly to this course's earlier material on Nkrumah's authoritarian turn in Ghana.