The centenary of Frantz Fanon

The reception of Frantz Fanon's (1925–1961) thought in Brazil says something important about the developments, creations and limits of our critical horizon.

At this time when we celebrate the centenary of the birth of the psychiatrist, politician and philosopher from Martinique – who added another name to his, Ibrahim, to remember that his place was among those who fought against the colonial forces – it is worth reflecting on how Fanon is read in Brazil, on what is read and what is not read.

The singularity of his reception among us must be emphasized. For a long time, translations of his books were rare. The Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1968 and, 40 years later, returned to bookstores through a university press. Black Skins, White Mask was translated in the early years of the 21st century by another university press with limited circulation.

It was only in 2020, beginning with two Ubu books, Alienation and Freedom: Psychiatric Writings, and the new translation of Black Skins, White Mask, that his work was finally made available to the general Brazilian public. Since then, new translations have appeared, such as Political Writings and For an African Revolution in 2021, and the new translation of The Wretched of the Earth in 2022.

This year, to mark the centenary, Year V of the Algerian Revolution and two collections of essays were released, Pensar Fanon, with the most important texts of commentaries on the author, and Desde Fanon, a consistent work by researchers Deivison Faustino and Muryatan Barbosa.

I emphasize this point to emphasize how an author who, in a sense, was marginalized in national intellectual debates managed, in five years, to become an essential reference for our critical thinking. This says something about the Brazilian academy's heightened sensitivity to colonial issues, as well as to the intersection of racialization and psychological suffering.

Fanon was initially a psychiatrist who understood that there can be no colonialism without the establishment of a psychology that turns race into a "psychic prison." Psychic subjection perpetuates colonial violence through a system of identifications and expectations of recognition capable of elevating the colonizer's ideals to internalized violence against the history, knowledge, and skin of the colonized. Few have been able, as he has been, to show how psychology is the continuation of the politics of subjection by other means.

His perspective was shaped by the institutional psychotherapy pioneered at the Hospital de Saint-Alban in France. There, the disciplinary nature of the hospital, medical authority, and the power structures underlying our notions of "health" and "healing" were questioned.

By understanding the profound relationships between institutional structures—which attempt to shape us through systems of norms and laws—and psychological suffering, Fanon realized that such clinical reflection had explosive political consequences when we turned our attention to countries subjugated by colonialism. In other words, it became clear that psychiatry was inseparable from the naturalization of minority mechanisms applied to entire populations.

Colonial mark. Born in Martinique, the thinker was chief physician at a psychiatric hospital in France, where he began to develop the theory of psychic subjection – Image: Frantz Fanon Imec Archive

Certainly, these reflections spoke loudly in a country like Brazil, where psychoanalysis, anti-asylum practices and various psychotherapies, such as schizoanalysis, had an almost unique destiny in the world, continuing their influence in the field of culture.

For, at the same time as he brought about the political deepening of the clinic, Fanon provided a structured understanding of the mechanisms of permanence of colonial subjection and its racialization devices, something that the Brazilian clinic little developed – despite exceptions such as Lélia Gonzales (1935–1994) and Neusa Santos Souza (1948–2008).

However, Fanon's reception is perhaps also the most polished example of the limits inherent in a certain decolonial trend that imposes itself on us, especially from the style produced by expatriate university students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and Columbia, seeking to impose the same set of questions and authors on the entire world without worrying about resonating with critical traditions and local struggles.

Appropriated as a kind of “one of his own,” Fanon, however, brings a colonial critique of a very different nature from this hegemonic one, which weaves totalizing crusades against Eurocentrism; which feels better within epistemic struggles than in concrete engagement in struggles for national liberation and critique of Capital; and which does not know what to do with a militant revolutionary internationalism.

In this sense, a book like Thinking Fanon is invaluable. It brings together both foundational texts on this problematic appropriation (such as those by Homi Bhabha and bell hooks) and others that recall the actual horizon of Fanon's concerns (such as those by Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, and Guillaume Silbertin-Blanc).

For it would be fitting to remember how Fanon's thought and practice are inseparable from a consistent, revolutionary Marxism tied to the struggles for a "humanity to come." This struggle understands the humanism that existed until now as a farce for not having achieved the material conditions for true generic emancipation. But at no point does he abandon the horizon of a universalism built through struggles and the liberation of psychic subjection.

To create such universalism, Fanon does not engage in a totalizing critique of any critical matrix generated on European soil, as if it were part of the same movement of epistemic subjection. Rather, he proposes a peripheral reading of authors such as Lacan, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, which complicates such matrices. This gesture makes explicit a desire for alliance capable of resonating experiences of critique and struggle against oppression in their diverse geographies. In other words, he forges alliances with multiple critical traditions, hoping that such alliances can resonate with multiple experiences of resistance.

At this point, a more careful reading of Year V of the Algerian Revolution and, especially, The Wretched of the Earth could spare us many misunderstandings. The latter is clear in its purpose from the title. It is no coincidence that it refers to the first verse of the Communist International: "Arise, Wretched of the Earth..."

These convicts were often understood as the urban and industrial proletariat. Fanon's entire effort is to show how, in colonized countries, the urban proletariat is a small segment and more integrated into colonial modernization.

Hence the need to better understand the role of the agrarian masses, their forms of resistance, and their attachment to the land as a factor of freedom. Incidentally, this will also be the subject of reflection by Carlos Marighella, someone with whom Fanon would have much to discuss.

In other words, the central problem is typically one of Marxist political action. To remove these dimensions from Fanon, without considering the challenges of racialization, is to forget the lesson of someone who is not a university student writing for other university students, but a psychiatrist and a politician who engages in national liberation struggles and advocates for international revolutions. He is someone who writes for those who want to engage in such struggles.

Published in issue no. 1374 of CartaCapital , on August 13, 2025.

This text appears in the printed edition of CartaCapital under the title 'The centenary of Frantz Fanon'