Barton Massey
AFAM 1PM MWF
October 14, 2014
Frantz Fanon was a man born without identity. A man who forged his own future, and a man who helped forge the future of the entire world with both his literature and his deeds. He was a political radical and his works influenced many rather radical movements and people. Fanon was born in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean, which at the time was a French colony. His father was a descendant of an enslaved African native and his mother was the illegitimate child of both African and European decent. Fanon was well educated as he was put through the most prestigious high school that Martinique had to offer. After French sailors overthrew Martinique's government, Fanon fled the island and joined the Free French Forces. He fought in many important battles in World War II and traveled all across Europe. After the war, he sought further education and eventually qualified as a psychiatrist.
He worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria for several years until his deportation.
Fanon never really held a "power position" so to speak. His influences are subtler and longer lasting. His true form of influence was his writing. He wrote many famous books some of which are Black Skin, White Masks, "originally titled 'An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks'"(newsreel.org) in which he addresses the experience of a black person living in a white world, and what oppressive colonization does to the natives being colonized, and his most famous book The Wretched of the Earth that addressed the role of race, and social class in colonization and the and the violence in the struggle of decolonization.
Fanon had a mostly social influence as a whole. He never strived to gain power or wealth, but only to share his...