A revolutionary-psychiatrist and writer of African Revolution in pan-Africanist terms, Frantz Fanon may have been critically "recognized" in the U.S. academy of the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But this belated move was made after certain movements of 1960s and 1970s had revived his work which had been condemned by Western colonial capitalism as well as many Western and Westernized Marxists.
Thanks especially to the Black Power Movement of North Africa and beyond, all of Fanon's four books circulated and once received due attention in popular rather than elite bourgeois social spheres: namely, The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, and Black Skin, White Masks - in chronological order of French-to-English translation. Decades later, however, when neo-colonial imperialism becomes hegemonic, there would be a superficial academicization of "Fanon" that presents him as a "post-colonialist" instead of anti-colonialist who both prophesies and opposes neo-colonialism. The academic distortion of Fanon (and colonialism) continues to reduce to him to a few pages of one, his first book-text, the one which was written before the bulk of his anti-imperialist corpus and his radical turn toward Africa, the "Third World," and revolution.
This lecture contextualizes the study of Fanon by returning us to the complete Fanon without the post-colonialist mythologies of neo-colonizing Western academia. What else can we see in Fanonism as a result?