Frantz Fanon: A Biography

Literary Review

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.

New Statesman

This year’s biographical tour de force.

New York Times Book Review

A prodigiously researched, absorbing book about the mind and the passion of a twentieth-century revolutionary.

Washington Post

Macey’s richly informative and engaging biography provides the historical, social and cultural context that is essential for understanding this passionate and courageous intellectual.

From The Critics

There is no shortage of biographies of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the psychiatrist from Martinique who lent his voice to the Algerian struggle for independence (1954-1962) and became known posthumously for advocating the therapeutic value of violence in the fight against colonialism. Macey, who has published extensively on twentieth-century French social thought, spends a long first chapter of his book describing his subject's marginality, back in Fanon's day and in present-day discourse—perhaps not the best way of endearing readers to the 600 pages that follow. Despite this unconvincing start, the volume makes several contributions to the literature on Fanon, whose writings fell victim to French censorship during the Algerian War. First, using his subject's lesser-known writings, Macey sheds light on Fanon's advocacy of violence in anti-colonial movements. Second, he raises questions regarding Fanon's espousal of the Algerian cause. Third, he takes seriously Fanon's work as a psychiatrist who rejected Freud (and, incidentally, Marx). Two tools would have made Macey's book more user-friendly: a chronology of Fanon's life and another of the Algerian War. —Beate Sissenich

(Excerpted Review)

Kirkus Reviews

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)