Episode Details

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who treated the psychological damage of colonialism in Algeria — both in the colonized patients who came to him broken and in the French soldiers who came to him after torturing them. He wrote The Wretched of the Earth, the book that became the intellectual foundation for every anti-colonial liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and he died of leukemia at thirty-six, before the Algerian independence he had fought for was declared.

This episode traces Fanon from his Martinican childhood through Black Skin, White Masks, the Algerian War, The Wretched of the Earth, and the early death that cut short the most important anti-colonial thinker of the twentieth century.

• Fanon's Martinican childhood and the racial consciousness that shaped his psychiatric perspective
• Black Skin, White Masks and the psychological analysis of colonialism's damage to the colonized
• The Algerian War, the FLN alliance, and the psychiatric work treating both victims and perpetrators
• The Wretched of the Earth, the endorsement of revolutionary violence, and his death at thirty-six