Body Of Fanon example essay topic

385 words
Whilst Fanon has been lauded since his death, the reality is that he had little influence over the direction of the FLN when he was alive. His writings were more influential after his death, and then outside Algeria and France. For a period in the late 1960's, his name and ideas were invoked by a bewildering variety of causes and groups. In the US, Black Panther leader Stoke ly Carmichael claimed Fanon as one of his "patron saints" and Eldridge Cleaver boasted that every brother on a roof top could quote Fanon (despite this Fanon could certainly not be described as a black nationalist).

While in Ghana, Fanon developed leukemia, and though encouraged by friends to rest, he refused. He completed his final and most fiery indictment of the colonial condition, The Wretched of the Earth, in 10 months, and Jean-Paul Sartre published the book in the year of his death. On the day, when news of his death reached Paris his most famous book The Wretched of the Earth was seized by the police on the grounds that it was a threat to national security. Different versions of Fanons death exist today. The commonly accepted one is that Fanon died at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he had sought treatment for his cancer, on December 6, 1961. However, even today biographers are not sure yet how Fanon was buried.

According to David Decker, body of Fanon was flown back from America and carried across the militarized border between Tunisia and Algeria for a secret nighttime burial on occupied territory. According to Homi Bhabba, Fanons body was buried with honors by the Algerian National Army of Liberation. Fanon worked for a disciplined revolutionary movement and became a spokesperson for its set objectives and program. His mode of radical, innovative cultural analysis ranged across disparate disciplines and domains: from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to economic theory, literature, and popular culture; and from linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical investigations to uncovering the play of sexuality, the affects of the body, and the dispositions of the psyche. Given this range and complexity of Fanons work, his continuing relevance for cultural studies, especially in contested social and political spaces, seems solidly assured.

Bibliography

Homi, Bhabba. Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition, Foreword to Black Skin. White Masks (1986) Hussein Abdullahi Buchan.
Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985) Macey, David.
Frantz Fanon: A Biography, St Martins Press (2001) Irene L.
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1974) Fanon, Frantz.
The Wretched of the Earth. New York (1965) Gordon, Lewis R.
Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge (1995) Me mmi, Albert.
The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon. Massachusetts Review (1973) Toward the African Revolution.
New York (1967) Decker, Jeffrey.
Terrorism Unveiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algeria, Cultural Critique 17, (1991) Perinbam, Barbara.
Holy Violence, The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon: An Intellectual Biography (1982) de Beauvoir, Simone.
Force of Circumstance. New York: Putnam (1964).