Frantz Fanon: Purgation Through Violence

Abstract

In 1973 Irene Gendzier published a book on Frantz Fanon, a black French-educated physician and psychiatrist who became the apostle of violence in the anticolonial movement in Algiers. In her preface Professor Gendzier states that she had intended at the outset of her research to write a psychohistory of Fanon, but “as I became more involved in the Fanon story, in the French, Martiniquean, and Algerian aspects of Fanon’s life, I chose to concentrate more on the social and political dimensions of the man’s world and less on the individual roots of his response to it.”1