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The ultimate Black History Month reading list

The Wretched of the Earth

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'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis 
 
Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. 
 
'In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah Levy

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism

Fanon details the impact of colonialism on the psyches of black people. For the first time, I was able to understand empire as more than just an economic phenomenon, and in turn how much Africa's decolonisation was expected to reverse. Reading it more than 50 years after publication was a visceral confrontation with a legacy that remains a shadow over black people

In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism

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

This is not so much a book as a rock thrown through the window of the West. It is the Communist Manifesto of the anticolonial revolution, and as such it is highly important for any Western reader who wants to understand the emotional force behind that revolution

Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961) was an author from Martinique, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.

Frantz Fanon

Richard Philcox

Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism, and how some of us have been staged in its psychodrama

A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images. . . It is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellectual, who makes the book so hard to put down

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact as Frantz Fanon. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. 
 
Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, it established Fanon as a revolutionary thinker and remains just as relevant and powerful today.

Frantz Fanon

Praise for Black Skin, White Masks

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism

Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only h ...

A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and imag ...

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism

Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only h ...

A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and imag ...

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism

Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only h ...

A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and imag ...

Books by Frantz Fanon

Articles featuring Frantz Fanon

The ultimate Black History Month reading list

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