Who’s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?

Sam Klug in the Boston Review:

But single expressions are merely “pieces of a man,” as Adam Shatz, quoting Gil Scott-Heron, observes in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. In this timely and engaging new book—the first full-length biography in English since David Macey’s in 2000—Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon’s life and work. The unifying pursuit of Fanon’s life, Shatz argues, was the “disalienation” of those suffering from racial and colonial oppression—a project at once individual and social, clinical as well as political. For Fanon, Shatz concludes, this was the end goal of psychiatry as a practice of freedom.

At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply misread and distorted, The Rebel’s Clinic helps us return to all of Fanon—the fullness of his thought and practice beyond the familiar aphorisms.

More here.