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The Algerian War consolidated Fanon's alienation from the French imperial viewpoint, and in 1956, he formally resigned his post with the French government to work for the Algerian cause. His letter of resignation encapsulates his theory of the psychology of colonial domination, and pronounces the colonial mission incompatible with ethical psychiatric practice, If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people. (Toward the African Revolution 53). In the words of his biographer, David Macey in his new book Frantz Fanon: A life, Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism, and the spokesman of a Third World ism which held that the future of socialism - or even the world - was no longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth. Beyond the evocative power of Fanon's work for such mass movements, his writings have been of great interest for critics and theorists of the new national literatures of Africa, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean, as well as for cultural critics of oppositional movements of women and minorities in North America and Europe.
In this particular regard, Fanon's theory of the stages in the evolution of the literature of all colonized peoples has been widely applied, often rather schematically. According to this theory, the first stage in the emergence of the national literatures of the colonized world, which Fanon describes as a derivative, imitative stage, is a stage of apprenticeship to the traditions and models of the colonizing countries. The second stage is characterized by the rejection of the authority and dominance of the colonizers paradigms and traditions and, simultaneously, nostalgia for the indigenous, autochthonous traditions of the colonized. The third and final stage in this process is for Fanon a fighting stage that produces a genuinely revolutionary literature, a peoples literature that forges new forms and themes closer to the movement to end colonial rule and to construct a genuinely democratic and egalitarian postcolonial culture. Another perceived salience of Fanon's work for contemporary critical theory lies in the ways his writings seemed to prefigure current theoretical obsessions with issues such as subject formation, otherness, and austerity; identity politics; and the centrality of psychoanalytic and linguistic paradigms for literary and cultural studies. Many biographers tell from Fanon's writings that he was not much interested in the insights to be gained through psychiatry.
He was a blamer who taught others to blame. His approach to truth was purely political: Truth is that which dislocates the colonial regime, that which promotes the emergence of the nation. In other words, he traded thinking for propaganda. Yet he was still regarded as an intellectual. In his writings psychiatrist Fanon romanticized murder. He argued that violence was necessary to Third World peoples not just as a way to win their liberty but, even more, because it would cure the inferiority complex that had been created by the teachings of white men.
Once liberated by violence, the formerly subject populations could help bring peace and socialism to everyone. For the young in many parts of the world, he perfectly expressed the spirit of the times. He was the talk of revolutionary Paris in the 1950 s, when the young Salt Sar, not yet known as Pol Pot, lived there. Later, in America, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers loved to quote him. The book in which Fanon clearly articulated his theory, The Wretched of the Earth, went into six editions in Arabic. Today it is hardly necessary for revolutionaries to read him.
His poison flows through the bloodstream of everyone who kills joyfully for an imaginary future.
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Research essay sample on Wretched Of The Earth National Literatures World
