The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon's landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel West
First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West's introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon's most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said's Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
"Certainly, writers of the sixties inspired by The Wretched of the Earth--the African novelists Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese critic Walter Rodney--saw in the book not an incitement to kill white people but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the post-colonial condition: how the West would seek to maintain the iniquitous international order that had made it rich and powerful, and how new ruling classes in post-colonial nations would fail to devise a viable system of their own. One measure of Fanon's clairvoyance--and the glacial pace of progress--is that, in its sixtieth year, The Wretched of the Earth remains a vital guide both to the tenacity of white supremacy in the West and to the moral and intellectual failures of the 'darker nations' . . . Sixty years after its publication, The Wretched of the Earth reads increasingly like a dying Black man's admission of a genuine impossibility: of moving beyond the world made by white men."--Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker
"The writing of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveals how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon."--Boston Globe
"Have the courage to read this book."--Jean-Paul Sartre
"This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism."--Angela Davis
"The value of The Wretched of the Earth [lies] in its relation to direct experience, in the perspective of the Algerian revolution . . . Fanon forces his readers to see the Algerian revolution--and by analogy other contemporary revolutions--from the viewpoint of the rebels."--Conor Cruise O'Brien, Nation
"The Wretched of the Earth is an explosion."--Emile Capouya, Saturday Review