To read Fanon's masterpiece, Les Damnés de la terre, today, a half-century after African decolonization and the triumph of the Algerian Revolution to which Fanon dedicated his life and thought, requires above all working through, critically and intensively, the complex and original critique of colonial, and defense of anticolonial violence that it contains. To do so requires above all rejecting all facile, unthinking dismissals of Fanon as an alleged ‘apostle of violence’ and to reject categorically the ridiculous, often-repeated claim of Hannah Arendt that Fanon celebrates ‘violence for its own sake’. Fanon was not writing in Les Damnés de la terre about violence in general, nor was he writing about urban riots, skinheads, the Shoah, or any of the other manifold forms of social violence characteristic of global modernity. He was rather writing about a specific situation and its particular forms of violence, that of French colonialism, and, even more specifically, as a leading member and intellectual voice of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), of French colonial violence in Algeria since the Sétif massacre in 1945 and in the Algerian War of 1954–1962.

Fanon's anticolonial humanism takes the form in Peau noire, masques blancs of a Sartrean assertion of human freedom, the refusal of any fixed, a priori human essence in the face of the potential to ‘invent [my] existence’ and the absolute character of human ‘freedom’ (Fanon 1952: 187–188). The project of such a post-racial, militant humanism would consequently be to transcend the systematic ‘dehumanization’ of racism and colonialism and to ‘create the ideal conditions of existence in a humane [humain] world’ (ibid.: 188). Les Damnés de la terre concludes in similar terms, famously ‘taking up again the question of man’ in order to ‘recommence a history of man’ that would leave behind all Western European hypocritical invocations of the human that are no more than the imposition of the provincial formation of European racial and ethnocentrism, to engage instead the ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ of ‘a new man’ (Fanon 1961: 375, 376).