Frantz Fanon: A Biography

From Publishers Weekly
Macey (Lacan in Context), British translator, biographer and critic, is one of the foremost English-language chroniclers of the distinctive postwar French hybrids of psychological, political and historical thought. His Lives of Michel Foucault is so far the definitive biographical study of the prodigious thinker, and this biography of a fervent anti-colonialist revolutionary may be even more important for the role it could play in bringing Fanon's writings out of the American academy and back into common discussion. Fanon (1925-1961) was a native of Martinique, more than 10 years the junior of the radical "negritude" poet (and current mayor of Fort-de-France) Aim‚ C‚saire, who was one of his high school teachers. By the time Fanon's brilliant, blistering diatribe Black Skin, White Masks appeared from a Paris publisher in 1952, Fanon was a psychiatrist; he had been part of a Moroccan-based resistance unit during the war, and had found the white left irredeemably bigoted. (Fanon described the book as a study in "language and aggressivity.") Fanon's colossal shifts of registers (political, medical, poetic, sociological) in the book's phenomenology of racism are well explicated by Macey, who gives nuanced accounts of the African nationalist essays and books that followed (primarily concerning Algeria, where Fanon practiced), and complicates Fanon's advocacy of violence-as-catharsis one of the facets of his work that attracted the radical American left of the '60s. Macey does a terrific job throughout reconstructing the contexts in which Fanon conceived and wrote his works, and the terms with which one might best approach them. The book will be invaluable to scholars, but those looking for an entr‚e into postwar Francophone literature and its political militancy will find this book an excellent guide to notoriously thorny works, and to their author, who died of cancer soon after his illness was discovered. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In the first biography in some time, Macey (The Lives of Michel Foucault) offers a sensitive and powerful account of Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary, psychiatrist, Third World theorist, and author (The Wretched of the Earth). Fanon's call for violent revolution, as a means of countering colonialism's institutional and psychological effects on colonized peoples, fueled the Algerian Independence movement and set the stage for decolonization in the rest of colonial Africa and the Caribbean. Macey combines original research and other people's scholarship to reveal Fanon's interwoven theories on African decolonization, the War of Algerian Independence, and the lived experience of blacks. Inextricably linked to Fanon's theories and skillfully intertwined is the history of French colonialism and racism in France. Macey's writing and research is rich with historical context and personal information that both Fanon loyalists and general readers will appreciate. Macey details Fanon's Martinique childhood, military service, educational and professional experiences, activism, and writing life. Recommended for academic libraries as well as African history and black studies collections. Sherri Barnes, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Fanon is most often associated with the turbulent 1960s as a theorist of anticolonial violence and a figure celebrated by those of left-leaning politics. Macey reveals Fanon as a complex, reflective individual of cross-generational and cross-cultural identification and experience, a man of much richer texture than portrayed from the perspectives of either the French left or American black nationalists. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique and trained in France as a psychiatrist. He became head of a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he subsequently became associated with the struggle for liberation from France. Through research and interviews with Fanon, Macey conveys the complexity of a man whose range exceeded that of his image as a heroic revolutionary figure. Fanon's famous writings, The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Mask, reflect the impact of French colonialism in North Africa and the Caribbean. But it is through Fanon's work in psychiatry that Macey reveals a complex individual and work product that has gained increasing recognition in post-colonial studies in academia. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"David Macey has written a prodigiously researched, absorbing book about the mind and the passion of a twentieth-century revolutionary. Frantz Fanon is the first comprehensive biography in three decades; it is also the best, the most intellectually rigorous and the most judicious."—The New York Times Book Review

"David Macey's richly informative and engaging biography provides the historical, social and cultural context that is essential for understanding this passionate and courageous intellectual."—The Washington Post

"In the first biography in some time, Macey offers a sensitive and powerful account of Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary, psychiatrist, Third World theorist, and author . . . Macey's writing and research is rich with historical context and personal information."—Library Journal (starred)

"David Macey's Frantz Fanon is this year's biographical tour de force."—New Statesman

"Not just a lucid and well-researched account of the man and his works, it is one of the best books about contemporary history to have been published in recent years."—Literary Review

"A fascinating study of a passionate and intelligent thinker."—Scotland on Sunday

"Macey does a terrific job throughout reconstructing the contexts in which Fanon conceived and wrote his works, and the terms with which one might best approach them. The book will be invaluable to scholars, but those looking for an entré into postwar Francophone literature and its political militancy will find this book an excellent guide to notoriously thorny works, and to their author, who died of cancer soon after his illness was discovered."—Publishers Weekly



Book Description
David Macey's Frantz Fanon: A Life is an elegant and extremely accomplished biography of one of the 20th century's most influential third world thinkers, a black man from the Caribbean who died a member of the Algerian FLN and whose violently eloquent writings inspired self-styled revolutionaries around the world. Born in Martinique, then as now a departement of France, Frantz Fanon (l925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a soldier in the Free French Army, for which he had volunteered and in whose ranks he saw combat during the liberation of France. In Algeria, he came into contact with the Front de Liberation National whose ruthless struggle for an independent Algeria was met with quite exceptional violence by the French Army. Fanon identified completely with the FLN and soon became a marked man. Forced to flee Algeria when he resigned his post, Fanon subsequently worked with the FLN as a propagandist and ambassador. Based on extensive and original research, this is the most compete and objective biography of Fanon yet written. It sweeps away the myths that have grown up around him and reveals Fanon to be a complex figure, infinitely more interesting than the theorist of anti-colonial violence celebrated by the left in the 60s. Macey shows Fanon to have been a man formed in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism, and traces Fanon's intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of post-war French culture David Macey has done justice for the first time to the extraordinary life of a complex figure, flawed in some respects but fundamentally a humanist committed to the eradication of colonialism, a man whose angry and eloquent writings are still of fierce relevance today.


About the Author
David Macey has translated some twenty books from the French. He is the author of Lacan in Context, the acclaimed The Lives of Michel Foucault, and The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. He lives in Leeds, England.


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A biography of the Caribbean-born French psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary whose angry books (Black Skin White Mask, The Wretched of the Earth) and inflammatory speeches furthered the cause of Algerian independence and African nationalism in the 1950s. What's more important, the historical facts of a life or the anything-goes deconstructions of surviving texts? Just the facts, says Macey (The Lives of Michel Foucault, 1994, etc.). In his detailed study of this largely-forgotten figure from the war for Algerian independence (Fanon's books were posthumous bestsellers only in America, and they became somewhat notorious during the American civil rights movement), Macey shows that Fanon's shrill exultation of violence as a kind of social diuretic, as well as his explosive, frequently incoherent fulminations over racial bigotry, must be understood in terms of his origins. Born in 1925 into a prosperous middle-class family on Martinique that descended from freed slaves, Fanon aspired to what he thought were the civilized refinements of the white minority until he found this minority supporting the bigoted Vichy regime during WWII. But the Left was just as bad: Fanon spent part of the war at a Moroccan training camp for the Resistance, whose French leaders patronized, cheated, and actively despised black Martinicians and African Muslims. Later, as a psychiatrist practicing in a French Algerian mental hospital, Fanon saw African patients consistently misdiagnosed by doctors who refused to understand their culture, leading him to believe that their insanity was a reaction to French fear and loathing. His sympathies for African nationalists led to his banishment from French Algeria. He thenbecame a tireless spokesman, pamphleteer, and rabble-rouser for Algerian independence and African nationalism until he died from cancer in an American hospital. A respectful, if exhausting, portrait of an influential but marginal proponent of racial rage and third-world nationalism who did not live long enough to see his principles perverted by current regimes. (8 b&w maps)


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