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The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
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About This Book
A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for social and racial justice In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of "dis-alienation" in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic , Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life―and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs
Reviews
"Nimble and engrossing ..."
"Thoroughly researched ..."
"The range is impressive (if gendered) and has the virtue of putting Fanon into conversation with a variety of perspectives, but Fanon sometimes gets lost in the crowd ..."
"The author's primary concern is less to do with situating Fanon in a collective history than with offering a portrait, as he puts it, of a 'man', not an icon ..."
"Shatz...is a mostly steady hand in turbulent waters ..."
"Does not reveal a strikingly different Fanon than does David Macey's deeply researched Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000)."
"The result is a striking appraisal of a towering thinker."
"A sensitive and affectionate biography."
"And his writings must be contextualised within the different historical epoch in which he lived."
"When confronted with the more revolutionary, more nationalistic, more violent, and more truculent Fanons, Shatz's book can emit a note of high-minded frustration or bewildered rebuke."
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