The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon offers an analysis of the psychology of colonised peoples and of the path by which they reach liberation. Written out of his experience of the Algerian struggle for independence, the book treats colonialism as a system maintained by force and describes the condition it produces in the colonised, a mixture of humiliation and rage that shapes the whole of mental life. Fanon argues that decolonisation is not an orderly transfer of administration but the undoing of a world divided into settler and native, and he examines directly the place of violence in historical change and in the self-recovery of the colonised. The book is equally an interrogation of race, colonialism and psychological trauma, and it does not stop at the moment of independence. Fanon attacks with the same sharpness the disenfranchisement of the masses by the national elite once power has changed hands, and warns against the intertribal and interfaith animosities that can occupy the place a genuine national consciousness should hold. What emerges is a theory of revolutionary struggle that treats political liberation and the repair of the colonised mind as a single task, addressed to the peoples of the colonised world.

Written from the publisher description, Grove Press.

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• Frantz Fanon