Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination

Key Contemporary Thinkers (Polity)

by Nigel C. Gibson

Frantz Fanon was a French psychiatrist turned Algerian revolutionary of Martinican origin, and one of the most important and controversial thinkers of the postwar period. A veritable “intellect on fire,” Fanon was a radical thinker with original theories on race, revolution, violence, identity and agency.
This book is an excellent introduction to the ideas and legacy of Fanon. Gibson explores him as a truly complex character in the context of his time and beyond. He argues that for Fanon, theory has a practical task to help change the world. Thus Fanon’s “untidy dialectic,” Gibson contends, is a philosophy of liberation that includes cultural and historical issues and visions of a future society. In a profoundly political sense, Gibson asks us to reevaluate Fanon’s contribution as a critic of modernity and reassess in a new light notions of consciousness, humanism, and social change.
This is a fascinating study that will interest undergraduates and above in postcolonial studies, literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, politics, and social and political theory, as well as general readers.

Genres: Philosophy

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[أحمد عبد الفتاح]

الكتاب يستحق 5 نجوم لرؤيته المتعمقة لفانون لكن أعطيته أربعة فقط لحاجته الشديدة لإعادة التحرير باللغة العربية.

[Banan Tawileh]

ما يليق بترِكة فانون المهنية و النضالية والفكرية والهوية المركبة التي نشأت فيه إثر ذلك ..

[Annie]

Very good. We inherited a bunch of books from an uncle who is also a pretty radical leftist. This was one of them. I picked it up on a lark (who just picks up Fanon???), and actually enjoyed it! (My one year old daughter loved to look at it, too, especially Fanon's face. She also likes the Communist Manefesto because of Marx's face...)