In part inspired by Fanon, I went into the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and the murder of Black Panthers. I first read Fanon in the late 1960s, at about the same time that I saw Gillo Pontecorvo’s riveting pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers (1966). Bhabha writes that generations of readers come to Wretched, not for what the author has to say about violence but “for a more obscure reason, armed only with an imperfect sense of obligation toward the ideals they want to serve and the values they seek to preserve.” Bhabha is more ambivalent and more abstract than Philcox when it comes to the question of Fanon’s message to contemporary readers. Philcox asks, “How relevant is Fanon today?” He thinks that Fanon was “wrong on many points,” including the revolutionary role of the peasantry, Pan-Africanism, and what has happened to Algeria, but he also concludes that he is relevant for his analysis of alienation and decolonization. In a fiery essay at the back of the book, Philcox explains how and why he translated some of Fanon’s words, like “ nègre,” which he calls “that word dreaded by all translators of French texts. It’s also in a new translation by Richard Philcox. That edition has Sartre’s original introduction, plus a new foreword by the Indian scholar Homi K.

The Wretched of the Earth was republished in paperback in 2004. Like the names Marx and Engels, or Malcolm X and Alex Haley-the Black journalist who wrote Malcolm’s autobiography, and whose name is on the cover of Malcolm’s book-Fanon and Sartre have been linked in the pages of revolutionary history and legend for the last six decades. Published 60 years ago in 1961 The Wretched of the Earth was one of the seminal works of the Sixties, in part because it came with an introduction by the French philosopher, novelist and Third World defender Jean-Paul Sartre. We will be free, by any means necessary.” That was the cry I heard everywhere, “By any means necessary.” That meant violence if need be. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary. Americans taught the black people to be violent. He elaborated, “Violence is a part of America’s culture. Near the peak of the Black Power movement, Brown Americanized Fanon and gave him an African-American inflection. Fanon laid the groundwork for Rap in his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, which inspired members of SNCC, plus Black Panthers, Weathermen and more. He was in a hurry and cities were burning. Rap Brown didn’t credit Frantz Fanon in his famed 1967 speech on violence, though he might have. Photograph Source: Tony Webster – CC BY 2.0

The wretched of the earth book