In this reinterpretation of Frantz Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu makes Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure - advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers "Black Skin", "White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth". But the controversies attending his life - and death, which some ascribed to the CIA - are small in comparison to those ...
Read More
In this reinterpretation of Frantz Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu makes Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure - advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers "Black Skin", "White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth". But the controversies attending his life - and death, which some ascribed to the CIA - are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. "Fanon's Dialectic of Experience" invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience - the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath - in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.
Read Less
