As we mark the centenary of his beginning, Frantz Fanon’s voice resonates with a extra pressing readability than ever earlier than — inside universities, on streets, and inside the innermost consciousness of these compelled to defy the enduring legacies of empire.
A French-trained psychiatrist of Martinican origin, Fanon [1925-1961] later grew to become an Algerian revolutionary, standing as one of the most influential and contested intellectuals of the post-World War period. While he was usually caricatured, as a mere “apostle of violence”, in the phrases of Edward Said, a more in-depth studying of his work reveals a rigorous and nuanced humanist, deeply dedicated to confronting injustice.
Traumas of colonisation
For me, Fanon has by no means been merely an creator to show; he’s a thinker whose work unremittingly calls for engagement, providing a framework by which to confront the complexities of our world. My introduction to the spirit behind his e-book, The Wretched of the Earth (1963), got here not from a proper tutorial curriculum, however from the profound ethical unrest and social upheavals that surrounded me. In these moments, conventional lecture rooms appeared to perpetuate silence and complicity, failing to offer a language to successfully tackle the structural violence and systemic discriminations that existed past their partitions. It was Fanon, the intransigent revolutionary idealist, who gave me and my era a vocabulary for that dissonance.
Later, as I started instructing postcolonial cultural concept, The Wretched and his earlier e-book, Black Skins, White Masks,transcended their position as mere texts, as an alternative serving as a catalyst to unsettle the sterile tutorial surroundings and confront the harsh realities of colonial misery, whereas concurrently igniting deep timeless hope.
His work in Algeria powerfully uncovered the psychological and political violence of French colonial rule, a twin perspective of a psychiatrist tending to the psychic traumas inflicted by colonisation, and a revolutionary theorist unflinchingly diagnosing the structural afflictions of empire and “the systematic negation of the other”.
Challenging energy constructions
For college students in India, Palestine, Africa, and past, his concepts, subsequently, don’t remain mere abstractions. In current years, many throughout the world see in his writings a mirror to their very own situation of militarised occupation, psychic ordeal, and a craving for self-expression. In classroom conversations about Gaza, Fanon’s examination of the coloniser’s violence and the colonised’s rage feels chillingly contemporary, when confronted by the vexing query: why, if individuals of Gaza are dying in such horrific numbers, does Israel persist in its relentless bombardment?
As Fanon would have answered, colonial violence isn’t about territorial management; it’s theatrical, a grotesque show of supremacy, a ritualised annihilation feeding on breaking the human spirit. Similarly, the immigrant detention system in the United States is exactly primarily based on Fanon’s view of colonialism as a system of compartmentalisation, of dividing, isolating, and controlling our bodies primarily based on race, geography, and energy.
Mourners carry the our bodies of Palestinians killed in an early morning Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip, July 21, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
This is why Fanon can’t be handled as a mere historic determine, frozen in 1961, the 12 months he died. His centenary will not be a commemoration however a confrontation at a time when the right-wing assault on universities intensifies, as dissent stands criminalised and tutorial freedom extensively curtailed. Fanon provides not consolation however readability, with a reminder that the college itself is a web site of contestation the place information and energy intersect and the place dominant narratives reinforce current energy constructions. However, universities additionally supply a platform for resistance, critique and transformation. His well-known dictum that “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it” is a problem that we should go on to our college students.
The questions remain
Understandably, Fanon’s insistence on company resonates powerfully with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), one other formative textual content in the mental journey of many radical activists. Like Fanon, Freire had emphasised that liberation will not be a present bestowed from above however a mutual course of of changing into, by what he known as conscientização, the follow of dialogue, vital consciousness, and praxis. Under their affect, the classroom ceased to be a sterile, apolitical area and revealed itself as a web site of battle the place dominant ideologies nudge one another and the place college students don’t remain passive recipients however flip into rebel co-authors of information and their very own histories.
Fanon, as everyone knows, wrote in a time of battle, exile, and revolutionary ferment. We, too, stay in a time of mass displacement, resurgent fascism, and mental repression. His questions remain ours, difficult us to suppose critically about energy, identification and freedom, encouraging us to try for a world the place people and communities can flourish with out the shackles of oppression. His contemporary relevance is each clear and compelling.
The author taught postcolonial cultural concept at Panjab University.
