Adam Shatz and Pankaj Mishra

Frantz Fanon is considered to be a pioneer of social theory with his understanding of personal pathologies as political symptoms and his argument that mental suffering is rooted in social causes. In the times of Black Lives Matter, his work has become essential for reflecting on contemporary colonialism and racism. His books, including The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, are still shaping social and anticolonial movements around the world.

In The Rebel’s Clinic, the biographer Adam Shatz shows how Fanon’s ideas on Black identity, colonialism, mental health, and violence were formed together with his own experiences of fighting in the Second World War, as a psychiatrist in colonial settings, and his involvement in the struggle for the liberation of Algeria.

This lecture is programmed as part of the course Fanon's Echoes, organized by the Barcelona Institute of Humanities, and directed by Javier García Fernández.