Sartre wrote these incendiary words in a preface to “ The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the French and West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” Sartre, despised in France for his solidarity with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted to goad people into seeing the “strip-tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.“Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement. Fanon’s analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of postindependence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Fanon’s masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said’s Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. The collaboration between Hakim’s Bookstore and Noname’s Book Club is as follows. Each month Noname’s Book Club selects two titles by POC and/or LGBTQ2IA+ authors to discuss among an online and in-person community of readers who (are learning to) love books.Ī distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. In order to facilitate meaningful in-person exchanges and economically empower Black-owned bookstores, Noname’s Bookclub will be building partnerships with Black book retailers in major cities to distribute the club’s monthly titles. Categories: African American Studies, History, Social Science The Wretched of the Earth
0 kommentar(er)
