The doctor who saw colonialism as a sickness

Becca Rothfeld reviews Adam Shatz’s new biography of Frantz Fanon in The Washington Post:

A biography of the psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is, inevitably, a biography of the world he fought to change. Fanon would no doubt have approved: As a pioneer of “social therapy,” an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms, he understood better than anyone that individuals are unintelligible in isolation. The maladies he treated as the director of a mental hospital in colonial Algeria, where he worked on the eve of the country’s fight for independence in the 1950s, were to him inextricable from the deadliest illness of all: the epidemic of French imperialism.

A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as “a cleansing force.” But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, “The Rebel’s Clinic,” Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers.

On the contrary, Shatz argues, the foremost theorist of anti-colonial resistance was a remarkably subtle thinker who rejected the reductions that tempted so many of his contemporaries.

More here. Adam Kirsch’s review in Air Mail can be found here, and Daniel Trilling’s review in the FT can be found here.