Né Antillais en 1925, mort Algérien en 1961, Frantz Fanon compte parmi les figures les plus emblématiques de la pensée anticoloniale d'après-guerre. Ses textes, Peau noire, masques blancs et Les Damnés de la terre sont des classiques du genre. Alice Cherki parcourt l'homme et son oeuvre, ses combats, ses pays et leurs enjeux : du jeune étudiant en médecine à Lyon à l'éminent psychiatre de l'hôpital de Blida en Algérie, où sa pensée tiers-mondiste prendra corps. Le regard de Frantz Fanon sur l'homme, la culture et l'aliénation sont uniques. Son histoire l'est tout autant.
"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon's discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared.... Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming―so alive."―from the Introduction Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was born in Martinique, and in 1943 left to fight in Europe with Free French forces. After 1945 he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyons and began to write. His first analysis of the effects of racism and postcolonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, appeared in 1952 and would become a foundational text for the liberation movements of the 1960s and later for postcolonial studies. In 1952 he moved to Algeria and practiced at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in French Algeria until 1957. From that year he worked full time for the Algerian independence movement, including a brief appointment as the movement's ambassador in Ghana. One of Fanon's few surviving contemporaries, Alice Cherki worked closely with Fanon at the psychiatric hospital in Blida and then later for the Algerian cause in Tunisia. This book is a record of "an epoch, a life, and a body of work often viewed as inadmissible." Cherki offers a unique assessment of Fanon's complex personality, illuminating both his psychiatric practice―of which she says, "Fanon possessed a tremendous intuition about the unconscious and a great erudition in psychoanalytic theory"―and the sources of his political activism, of his intellectual career as a pivot of the quickly changing world. Given the continuing relevance of Fanon's insights into the enduring legacy of colonialism on the psyches of the colonized, this compelling and personal account of his life and work will be required reading for anyone interested in the consequences of empire.
Frantz Fanon, schwarzer Psychiater, Revolutionär und Schriftsteller, schrieb mit der Leidenschaft eines Betroffenen über das bis heute brennende Problem des Rassismus. Alice Cherki, algerische Psychiaterin, schildert Leben und Werk ihres Kollegen. Sie zeigt Fanon als Wegbereiter für ein Verständnis der Gewalt der Ausgegrenzten und Unterdrückten. Seine Analyse der Spirale von Gewalt und Gegengewalt, Terror und Gegenterror hat nichts an Aktualität verloren. „Wir haben Alice Cherki dafür zu danken, daß sie diesem hervorragenden Intellektuellen, seiner Person wie seinen Büchern, den Platz gegeben hat, den sie verdienen - nicht nur in unserer Geschichte, sondern auch in unserer Gegenwart.“ Nouvel Observateur "Ich höre noch heute Josies wütende Stimme, als sie ausgiebig die Szenen der Gewalt kommentierte, die sie gesehen oder von denen man ihr berichtet hatte. Auf ein neues, Frantz, > Die Verdammten dieser Erde
