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Fanon and Africa: a Retrospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

The work of Frantz Fanon, who died 25 years ago, was the locus of many clashing contradictions. There were many Fanons, living uneasily together. The prophet of a cleansing revolutionary violence, which would re-unite what lethargic white self-interest had put asunder, found strange company in the psychiatrist whose case-histories recorded its traumatic effects: violence was both socially regenerative and personally degenerative, a renovating healer and a destructive sickness, a mystical release and a dehumanising barbarity. The devotee of French culture reviled French colonialism, and the humanitarian realist who acknowledged the revolutionary sacrifices of Algeria's Europeans was no doubt uncomfortable about the partisan propagandist whose necessary racism could not afford concessions to white altruism. Most relevant to the situation and prospects of independent Africa, however, was the deadlocked struggle fought between the committed nationalist in Fanon and the pan-Africanist who sought to make the nation the magical springboard into continental unity.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

Page 679 note 1 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Farrington, Constance (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 173.Google Scholar

Page 680 note 1 Ibid. p. 182.

Page 680 note 2 Fanon, Frantz, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, translated by Chevalier, Haakon (New York, 1967), p. 63.Google Scholar

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Page 681 note 1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 168–70.

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Page 682 note 1 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 224.

Page 682 note 2 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 114.

Page 682 note 3 Ibid. p. 196.

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Page 683 note 2 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, pp. 131 and 135.

Page 683 note 3 Ibid. p. 136.

Page 683 note 4 Caute, op.cit. pp. 76–7.

Page 684 note 1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 74.

Page 684 note 2 Ibid. p. 42.

Page 685 note 1 Ibid. pp. 127 and 129.

Page 685 note 2 Ibid. pp. 105–6.

Page 686 note 1 Ibid. p. 164.

Page 686 note 2 Ibid. p. 132.

Page 686 note 3 Ibid. pp. 161–2.

Page 687 note 1 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp. 157 and 179.

Page 687 note 2 de Beauvoir, Simone, Force of Circumstance, translated by Howard, Richard (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 609.Google Scholar

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