![]() Oppression and mental illnessįanon recognised mental illness as a real experience that people endure. But these mentors had theįoresight to appreciate the importance of his thinking in this field. His texts were not considered mainstream at the time. I was encouraged by a group of black psychologists to engage with theĮmancipatory potential of Fanon’s approach to mental illness. My first encounter with Fanon’s work was more than two decades ago asĪ young trainee psychologist at the University of the Western Cape in SouthĪfrica. It is in his critique of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb that Fanon’s conceptual clarity emerges with a robustness that has remained influential for over five decades. It’s in these early experiences that we see many of his most revered ideas being incubated, only to become consolidated in his later texts.įanon was influenced by writings from Negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Thinking stemmed from his experiences working with mental illness in NorthĪfrica as a psychiatrist. All continue to be read voraciously.īut there’s often a failure to recognise that much of Fanon’s seminal ![]() ![]() Posthumously, Toward the African Revolution (1964) was published. His seminal texts included Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He is often being incisively referenced as a key thinker by many current writers. But it’s the scholar Frantz Fanon who stands head and shoulders above them all. It has an impressive lineage among Latin American, Caribbean, African and other Southern scholars. But this lens through which to understand the world has been around for a much longer time. The contemporary turn towards decolonial thinking is frequently cited in literature from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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