The existence of these plays has been known and written about their inclusion here exemplifies the public archival nature of this book. Part I regards this brief corpus of two plays, The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands, which both date from 1949. It is perhaps entirely appropriate that, given Fanon’s dramatic life, Alienation and Freedom should begin with his attempts at writing drama during his time at university. In short, Khalfa and Young leave few stones unturned. In addition to the main introduction, a shorter introduction is provided for each part, along with annotations, photographs, illustrations and a chronology of Fanon’s life. In between, the bulk of the book is committed to his psychiatric research, with 27 chapters, nearly half of the volume, spent on this dimension of his writing. Alienation and Fre edom in content and form reflects the peregrinations of a restless man whose experience of racism led to personal self-determination, who chose intellectual commitment over social status, who embraced the risks of political involvement rather than accept a secure middle-class livelihood.ĭivided into five sections with 55 chapters in total, the vast majority consisting of pieces either authored or co-authored by Fanon, Alienation and Freedom undertakes a chronological approach that ranges from his early, unpublished work during his student days at Lyon to a posthumous cataloguing of his personal library. This book’s title captures these contrasts. The wellspring of this elusiveness is undoubtedly due to his personal geography and the contrasting dimensions produced from his unsettled life. Fanon is that rare figure who manages to become more enigmatic through further revelation. ![]() Indeed, the uneven quality of the collection-a mix of published and unpublished material by Fanon, plus supplementary material by others-imparts an unusual effect that both further explains Fanon’s intellectual and political motivations while also generating new questions that leave Fanon as inscrutable as ever. A fine-grained sense of his views across the fields of psychiatry, philosophy, and politics over a brief, but intense, period of a dozen years is at hand. Most significantly, Alienation and Freedom shows us the rough edges of Fanon’s thinking, much of which has been worn smooth through decades of scholarship. Though it naturally conforms to the life of activism that is well known, this book provides firsthand information about his medical interests, confirms past rumor about his decision-making with evidence, and offers a few surprises, especially with regards to his early writing and personal correspondence. First published in French by La Découverte in 2015, Alienation and Freedom is the first major collection of new writing by Fanon to be published in more than 50 years, since the 1964 release of Pour la révolution africaine ( Toward the African Revolution), translated into English in 1967.Īs such, this volume uncovers a wealth of detail and a revised biographical outline of Fanon. This book is therefore indisputably a gift, a cause for celebration. Young and translated by Steven Corcoran, is an attempt to alleviate this problem of documentation-in essence, to create a posthumous archive of his work which thus far has been scattered across the aforementioned places in state repositories, medical libraries, university collections and private hands. From a research standpoint, however, these movements are something of a disaster.Īlienation and Freedom, a new collection of Fanon’s writings edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. ![]() All told, from a biographical standpoint, Fanon’s frequent movements remain a source of fascination. He spent shorter periods of time in Accra, Bamako, Conakry, Moscow, Paris and Rome. In between, he lived in France, where he received a medical degree from the University of Lyon in Algeria, where he worked at a psychiatric hospital in Blida, near Algiers and Tunisia, where he continued his clinical research and wrote for Algeria’s anti-colonial Front de L ibération N ationale (FLN), a cause he joined while in Blida. He died from cancer in 1961 at the age of 36 in a hospital outside of Washington, DC. Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
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