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FRANTZ FANON (1925–61) Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France, and worked initially as a psychiatrist. His early writing brought together his experiences of colonialism with his psychiatric training, as he investigated the torturous psychological effects of colonization and racism on colonized peoples. In Peau noire, masques blancs (1952, trans. Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon powerfully exposes and critiques the invidious process whereby the colonized come to regard themselves as ‘other’, not fully human, and opens up the beginnings of a philosophical and existential critique of European humanism which would subsequently prove influential for a wealth of writers and thinkers. In 1953 Fanon joined the staff of Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, and became involved in the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule. Expelled from Algeria in 1957 by the French, Fanon spent much of the rest of his life travelling across Africa and contributing to the anti-colonial and independence initiatives in Algeria, Tunis, Ghana and elsewhere. His collection of essays Les Damnés de la Terre (1961, trans. The Wretched of the Earth) stems from this period, and explores the operations of anti-colonial violence, the problems of Pan-Africanism, the pitfalls of national consciousness, and much besides. It was completed in the year that Fanon died from leukaemia in the USA where he was receiving treatment for his illness. His body was subsequently buried in Algeria. Fanon’s influence remains profound across a range of contemporary contexts – from anti-colonial nationalism to theories of subjectivity – and his work is frequently cited, almost always approvingly, throughout the field of postcolonial studies. At times Fanon’s significance as an intellectual and thinker has tended to obscure his political activism, and his work has often been cheerfully disconnected by some from the contexts of Algeria and the anticolonial struggle, to the chagrin of certain critics.