From Paris and Rome to Quebec - Reading Fanon in Radical Montreal Intellectual Circles of the 1960s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to trace the socio-political context in which Frantz Fanon’s thought reached left-wing French and English-speaking intellectuals in Montreal between 1950 and 1970, and to analyze the reception of the theses of the author of The Wretched of the Earth in the discourse of these circles on culture and art, especially literature. The reading of Fanon’s main concepts becomes here the object of a certain cultural-political interpretation, in which strategies of adaptation or even appropriation make it possible to inscribe Fanon’s work in the Franco-Quebecois independence struggle in the era of the Quiet Revolution or to link the identity aspirations of the Quebec Black minority with the demands of the Black Power movement as well as the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. In these different contexts, literature has its own distinct tasks, inextricably linked to the aspirations of the societies within which it is produced. From defending the language of the dominated to creating a new vision of the world and of man, through direct involvement in political affairs: the writer, according to Fanon interpreted in Quebec, becomes one of the central figures of the revolutionary struggle.