The Wretched of the Earth

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Grove/Atlantic, Inc., Dec 1, 2007 - Social Science - 320 pages

The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel West

First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

 

Selected pages

Contents

I
xliii
II
1
III
63
IV
97
V
143
VI
179
VII
233
Copyright

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Page xxix - The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.
Page xxxvii - ... domination, massively affirms his superiority. The social group, militarily and economically subjugated, is dehumanized in accordance with a polydimensional method. Exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations, rational oppression take turns at different levels in order literally to make of the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation. This object man, without means of existing, without a raison d'etre, is broken in the very depth of his substance. The desire to...
Page xxix - ... last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

About the author (2007)

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He served in the French Army during World War II, and later studied medicine and psychiatry in France, where he published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. He joined the Algerian Nationalist Movement in the mid-1950s, and published The Wretched of the Earth shortly before dying of leukemia in December 1961.

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