Frantz Fanon, born on this day in 1925, was a West Indian Pan-Africanist philosopher and Algerian revolutionary most known for his text The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon was born to an affluent family on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony which is still under French control today. As a teenager, he was taught by communist anti-colonial thinker Aimé Césaire (1913 - 2008).

Fanon was exposed to much European racism during World War II. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, a Nazi government was set up in Martinique by French collaborators, whom he describedas taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".

Fighting for the Allied forces, Fanon also observed European women liberated by black soldiers preferring to dance with fascist Italian prisoners rather than fraternize with their liberators.

While completing a residency in psychiatry in France completing, Fanon wrote and published his first book, "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people.

Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, a nationalist Algerian party. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French troops who carried out torture to suppress anti-colonial resistance, as well as their Algerian victims.

While organizing for Algerian independence in Ghana, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia that would ultimately kill him. He spent the last year of his life writing his most famous work, "The Wretched of the Earth" (French: Les Damnés de la Terre). The text provides a psychiatric analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization and examines the possibilities of anti-colonial liberation

Following a trip to the Soviet Union to treat his leukemia, Fanon came to the U.S. in 1961 for further treatment in a visit arranged by the CIA. Fanon died in Bethesda, Maryland on December 6th, 1961 under the name of "Ibrahim Fanon", a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital after being wounded during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.

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  • iThinkImDumb [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    There was a thread recently about most lib movies. This isn't a movie, but an HBO show I've been trying to watch. Gentleman Jack. A fucking disgusting libfest. Lesbians = good, and yeah we can agree on that. But The protagonist is a despicable land-owning rentier, exploitational capitalist. The show (justly) encourages viewers to cheer on her gall and wit in the face of bigotry wrt to sexuality, but without missing a beat, it also demands that we all accept the protag's bourgeoisie, disgusting place in a disgusting hierarchy during the peak of British colonialism. :stalin-stressed:

      • Woly [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Castle!

        I enjoyed that show for a while until I realized that every single episode had the same three beats. Crime happens, interview a witness or friend who they might suspect but exonerates themselves through some detail or alibi. Move on to the real suspect, spend the majority of the episode gathering evidence and chasing them down. Finally catch and interrogate the real suspect, they reveal a crucial piece of information that implicates the original suspect. Go back and rest the original guy, who was actually secretly evil the whole time.

        Every. Single. Episode. Except the one where they had the diffuse and nuclear bomb and Nathan fillion just screamed and ripped the cables out, that was funny.

            • ItsPequod [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Fuck right I forgot they just made Castle again but he just joins the cops straight up instead of just palling around with them

    • DragonNest_Aidit [they/them,use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      From my observation since late 00s there have been a wave of what I call "Victorian revisionism" where the whole deal is "the Victorian era wouldn't be so bad if they have let women and minorities be landlords, robber barons, and colonizers". At the time it was just on the internet among webcomics, blogs, and steampunk folk but I guess it have been slowly creeping into the mainstream.