Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

of these fields can partly be attributed to the prominence and influence of psychoanalysts, such as Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), in France during the 1950s. While it is true that Fanon specifically trained as a psychiatrist, it is fair to argue that psychoanalysis had a significant bearing on his thinking, given its general influence at the time and its particular validation for treating patients on an individual basis, rather than institutionally through asylums and hospitals—a phenomenon that had spanned Europe during the nineteenth century, resulting in the confinement of many. Fanon’s entry into the field therefore occurred at an exciting time when the discipline of psychiatry was undergoing a stimulating redefinition, motivated by the popularity of psychoanalysis. Both trends held appeal for the self-searching student.

      Other developments were also afoot. Fanon arrived during a vital period in French intellectual life, when a number of thinkers were grappling with the effects and meaning of the Second World War. His enrollment in classes given in the philosophy department at Lyon, where he attended lectures by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), is indicative of his engagement with this emergent scene.¹⁹ The war occasioned many disasters and challenges of broad human importance—the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, the Holocaust and its genocidal violence, and the advent of the nuclear age, among them—that raised fundamental questions of individual ethics and community politics for the postwar period. Like Fanon, some—such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (1913–1960)—had directly participated in the war, as members of the Free French. Other intellectuals—Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) and the African American writer Richard Wright (1908–1960), then based in Paris—applied similar scrutiny to intensifying issues of gender and race in the public sphere.

      This intellectual milieu represented in part by the journal Les Temps modernes, edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir, paralleled and interacted with the intellectual circle surrounding Présence africaine, the leading journal of black culture published in France. Founded in 1947 by Alioune Diop (1910–1980), a Senegalese writer, Présence africaine provided a crucial literary venue for the Négritude movement, but it embraced pan-African concerns more generally. Comparing Présence africaine to Les Temps modernes, the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has written that the former sought “to bring in the very center of . . . French power and culture what was being negated in [the] colonies, that is, the dignity of otherness.”²⁰ Présence africaine, put simply, sought “to incarnate the voice of a silenced Africa.”²¹ These two publications consequently framed the intellectual world within which Fanon intended to find a place.

      Unlike Négritude, Fanon first encountered French continental philosophy primarily through reading, not personal connections. The prevalent trends were phenomenology and existentialism. Interrelated in scope, these philosophical approaches built on the nineteenth-century thought of German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), who argued that individual consciousness emerged dialectically between a person and the world, rather than solely through individual deductive reasoning as proposed by René Descartes (1596–1650), the French thinker considered to be the founder of modern philosophy. Drawing on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Hegel’s engaged method has since become known as phenomenology, as captured in his work The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). Among its most influential sections is the rumination on lordship and bondage—more often referred to as the master-slave dialectic—that articulated how self-consciousness (and power) depended on the presence of another person.²² Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), drawing on the parallel work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and his own mentor Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), extended phenomenology’s parameters in Being and Time (1927), to consider factors of place and time for further defining the dimensions of self-consciousness. One’s existence was not solely shaped by the presence of others, but also by these two situated aspects.

      These sources of thought from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that largely originated from a German philosophical tradition fundamentally informed the French phenomenology and existentialism that Fanon encountered. Being and Nothingness (1943) by Sartre and Phenomenology of Perception (1945) by Merleau-Ponty outlined French variations of these philosophical approaches, stressing the importance of personal experience and perception for self-realization. These ideas soon reached a popular audience, with Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) powerfully utilizing the roles of public perception and regard for understanding the construction of specific social group identities, rather than dwelling on the individual alone.

      This burst of philosophical inquiry held considerable appeal for a European intelligentsia recovering from the devastating effects of a war that had destroyed much of the continent physically, culturally, and morally. The notion of an indifferent world as conveyed by existentialism resonated with a public coping with the aftermath of violence and genocide—a sentiment reinforced by the absurdism and nihilism in popular fiction like Camus’s The Stranger (1942), set in his native Algeria.²³ Existentialism’s argument for free will, which drew on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) as well as Kierkegaard, and the concurrent need to recognize and work against “bad faith”—a practice of self-deception defined by aspirations to meet generic social standards or political demands, but ultimately preventing individual fulfillment—provided one answer for creating meaning in an uncertain postwar era.²⁴

      This prescription for self-actualization caught the attention of Fanon, as it did for so many—as did the bridging of academic and public realms. Indeed, Fanon’s interest in phenomenology and existentialism is readily understandable, given his early engagement with Négritude and surrealism through Aimé Césaire. Like psychiatry and these aesthetic movements, the philosophical approaches of phenomenology and existentialism drew on notions of the conscious and the unconscious and the vital importance in understanding these realms to advance and consummate self-understanding. Fanon’s early attempts at writing included plays in the vein of Sartre’s existential dramas. But these philosophical influences had a greater bearing on the manuscript that would result in Black Skin, White Masks, which soon preoccupied him—as did rapid developments in his personal and professional life.

      Fanon became romantically involved with two women during this period—experiences that likely informed his essays on gender and interracial relationships in his first book. Fanon had one child, Mireille, out of wedlock with a fellow medical student in 1948. His eventual neglect of this relationship can be attributed to the relationship he soon had with his future wife, Marie-Josephe Dublé (1931–1989), better known as Josie Fanon, whom he met in 1949.²⁵ Dublé came from a politically progressive background; her parents were trade unionists. Fanon and Dublé married in 1952. These personal changes overlapped with several equally fast professional transitions.