Frantz Fanon: A Biography [Hardcover]

David Macey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312275501
• ISBN-13: 978-0312275501
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 5.9 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,036,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > History > Africa > Algeria

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, July 25, 2005

By 

Christopher LaMonica "Professor" (Newport, RI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frantz Fanon: A Biography (Hardcover)

A superb introduction to French colonial thought and literature. For those of you who are interested in understanding the historical context within which this remarkable figure lived, I highly recommend this book. David Macey carefully addresses the various misrepresentations of Fanon, such as that by Hannah Arendt (most of the French of the time and others), who portrayed Fanon as simply being synonomous with violence. Fanon was a much more complex person than that: Driven, highly intelligent, a product of the French educational system, of WWII, of racism, a psychiatrist, a writer, yet born in Martinique and, after accepting a position in Algeria (rather than stay in France or return to Martinique), finds himself embroiled in an anti-France Algerian nationalist movement. The influences on him, his various professional decisions, as well as those that led him to direct involvement in wider African affairs, are carefully considered and documented. The footnotes, bibliography, and index are all much appreciated by this reader.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and will surely refer to it again.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!, April 20, 2005

By 

Justice - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frantz Fanon: A Biography (Paperback)

This book, though enormous, was an easy and entertaining read. I have really only one objection. The book was a great history book but there weren't enough details about Fanon the man. I do think that historical contextualization is essential in biographies and in fact they're one of my favorite ways to learn history.

However, you do expect to read a narrative of someone's life, whereas most of the time, I was reading a history of the Algerian Revolution. Which I wanted to anyway and have no problem with, that's just not what I thought I was getting into. I was greatly moved by Fanon's tragic early death and by his humanist ideals, and I think Macey was right to emphasize, as the famous academic Homi Bhabha recently did, that Fanon's advocacy of anti-colonial violence is not the most important or enduring aspect of his legacy. First and foremost Fanon wanted to see a better and more just world, and his unrelenting passion to empower the poorest of the poor-the wretched of the earth-is a justly lasting, powerful, and evocative sentiment.

However, there just wasn't much about him. I didn't learn all that much about him. The details on his personal life or intimate relationships were very scarce. I understand that not many records remain that describe his relationship with his wife or family but when you pick up a biography you expect intimate personal details that help make a person fully human.

If not enough of that exists anymore, then Macey, a talented and sensitive writer, should have called this book an analysis of Fanon's WRITINGS, not his life. Because most of what Macey tells us about Fanon he gets out of Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" and his other writings-he provides few interviews and even fewer insights. Maybe it's too late to write that book, but if you want to call this a biography, you have to make it one.

I still recommend the book if you are interested in Fanon's writings and the Algerian Revolution, which I was and am. But if you want to learn about Fanon the man, forget about it. Nothing in the book made me feel as if I knew anything other than Fanon the theorist and revolutionary. You get no sense of any other dimension of him than you would get if you read all his books.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Frantz Fanon: The Structuralist, November 29, 2008

By 

Carlos J. Sanchez (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frantz Fanon: A Biography (Paperback)

David Macey's book allow us to understand the contributions of Frantz Fanon to the treatment of patients with mental disorders. Fanon was one of the first one in the Third World to include the ecology of the patient in the treatment of mental disturbances. Some of his innovations are applicable to the treatment of the urban poor living in the neglected communities.

Carlos J. Sanchez, MA
CARLOSJUANSANCHEZ.COM