Continental · 1925–1961
Frantz Fanon
Martinican psychiatrist and theorist of anticolonial liberation
Fanon analysed how colonial racism enters the psyche of the colonised, making them see themselves through white eyes, and argued that decolonisation requires a total break with the colonial order.
Life and thought
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was born in Martinique, then a French colony, where the poet Aimé Césaire was among his teachers. He volunteered for the Free French forces in 1944 and was wounded; after the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon and trained under François Tosquelles at Saint-Alban. In 1953 he became head of a psychiatric service at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria, joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and was expelled in 1957. He died of leukaemia at 36.
Black Skin, White Masks describes being seen through a racist gaze: the Black man in France finds himself “overdetermined from without”, fixed by others’ looks into a body of stereotypes. Colonialism, Fanon argued, enters the mind, so the colonised try to become white in language and desire. The Wretched of the Earth, written as he was dying, argued that colonialism is violence ended only by a radical break, warned that a new national middle class might simply replace the colonisers, and called for a new humanism.
Works
Shaped by
1905–1980Jean-Paul SartreSartre prefaced The Wretched of the Earth; Fanon had earlier criticised Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus”.1770–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelBlack Skin, White Masks reworks Hegel’s master–slave dialectic for colonial racism.1908–1961Maurice Merleau-PontyFanon studied in Lyon while Merleau-Ponty taught there (1945–49) and is said to have attended his lectures; Black Skin, White Masks draws on his phenomenology of the body.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1919–2001G. E. M. AnscombeWittgenstein’s student and translator who relaunched virtue ethics1920–2010Philippa FootOxford moral philosopher who devised the trolley problem1921–2002John RawlsHarvard philosopher who revived political philosophy with justice as fairness1922–1996Thomas KuhnPhysicist turned historian of science who coined “paradigm shift”1926–2016Hilary PutnamHarvard philosopher who launched functionalism, then criticised it1929–2025Alasdair MacIntyreScottish-born philosopher who moved from Marxism to ThomismOn the record
Fanon attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures while studying in Lyon.
The dates fit: Fanon studied medicine in Lyon after the war, and Merleau-Ponty taught psychology at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1949. That Fanon sat in on his lectures is repeated in biographies and reference works, but the encyclopedia entries we checked do not confirm it; what is certain is that Black Skin, White Masks draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Lyon appointments 1945–1949) · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Frantz Fanon” · Wikipedia, “Frantz Fanon” (Lyon studies; claim uncited)