Frantz Fanon at 100: the teachings of the 20th century thinker and psychiatrist remain chillingly contemporary

The Hindu

4 days ago

As we mark the centenary of his birth, Frantz Fanon's voice resonates with a more urgent clarity than ever before — within universities, on streets, and within the innermost consciousness of those compelled to defy the enduring legacies of empire.
A French-trained psychiatrist of Martinican origin, Fanon [1925-1961] later became an Algerian revolutionary, standing as one of the most influential and contested intellectuals of the post-World War era. While he was often caricatured, as a mere 'apostle of violence', in the words of Edward Said, a closer reading of his work reveals a rigorous and nuanced humanist, deeply committed to confronting injustice.
Traumas of colonisation
For me, Fanon has never been simply an author to teach; he is a thinker whose work unremittingly demands engagement, offering a framework through which to confront the complexities of our world. My introduction to the spirit behind his book, The Wretched of the Earth (1963), came not from a formal academic curriculum, but from the profound moral unrest and social upheavals that surrounded me. In those moments, traditional classrooms seemed to perpetuate silence and complicity, failing to provide a language to effectively address the structural violence and systemic discriminations that existed beyond their walls. It was Fanon, the intransigent revolutionary idealist, who gave me and my generation a vocabulary for that dissonance.
Later, as I began teaching postcolonial cultural theory, The Wretched and his earlier book, Black Skins, White Masks,transcended their role as mere texts, instead serving as a catalyst to unsettle the sterile academic environment and confront the harsh realities of colonial distress, while simultaneously igniting deep undying hope.
His work in Algeria powerfully exposed the psychological and political violence of French colonial rule, a dual perspective of a psychiatrist tending to the psychic traumas inflicted by colonisation, and a revolutionary theorist unflinchingly diagnosing the structural afflictions of empire and 'the systematic negation of the other'.
Challenging power structures
For students in India, Palestine, Africa, and beyond, his ideas, therefore, do not remain mere abstractions. In recent years, many across the world see in his writings a mirror to their own condition of militarised occupation, psychic ordeal, and a yearning for self-expression. In classroom conversations about Gaza, Fanon's examination of the coloniser's violence and the colonised's rage feels chillingly contemporary, when confronted by the vexing question: why, if people of Gaza are dying in such horrific numbers, does Israel persist in its relentless bombardment?
As Fanon would have answered, colonial violence is rarely about territorial control; it is theatrical, a grotesque display of supremacy, a ritualised annihilation feeding on breaking the human spirit. Similarly, the immigrant detention system in the United States is precisely based on Fanon's view of colonialism as a system of compartmentalisation, of dividing, isolating, and controlling bodies based on race, geography, and power.
This is why Fanon cannot be treated as a mere historical figure, frozen in 1961, the year he died. His centenary is not a commemoration but a confrontation at a time when the right-wing assault on universities intensifies, as dissent stands criminalised and academic freedom widely curtailed. Fanon offers not comfort but clarity, with a reminder that the university itself is a site of contestation where knowledge and power intersect and where dominant narratives reinforce existing power structures. However, universities also offer a platform for resistance, critique and transformation. His famous dictum that 'Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it' is a challenge that we must pass on to our students.
The questions remain
Understandably, Fanon's insistence on agency resonates powerfully with Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), another formative text in the intellectual journey of many radical activists. Like Fanon, Freire had emphasised that liberation is not a gift bestowed from above but a mutual process of becoming, through what he called conscientização, the practice of dialogue, critical consciousness, and praxis. Under their influence, the classroom ceased to be a sterile, apolitical space and revealed itself as a site of struggle where dominant ideologies nudge each other and where students do not remain passive recipients but turn into insurgent co-authors of knowledge and their own histories.
Fanon, as we all know, wrote in a time of war, exile, and revolutionary ferment. We, too, live in a time of mass displacement, resurgent fascism, and intellectual repression. His questions remain ours, challenging us to think critically about power, identity and freedom, encouraging us to strive for a world where individuals and communities can flourish without the shackles of oppression. His contemporary relevance is both clear and compelling.
The writer taught postcolonial cultural theory at Panjab University.