Fanon analyzed colonialism as a world of racialized embodiment, psychic injury, economic domination, and violence, while arguing that liberation must create new social relations.
Intellectual setting
Trained in psychiatry after serving in the Second World War, Fanon worked in colonial Algeria and joined the Algerian liberation struggle, linking clinical experience to structural analysis.
Key ideas
Racialized embodiment
The colonial gaze interrupts lived bodily agency by imposing a racial schema with social and psychological force.
Decolonization
Liberation is not a simple transfer of offices but a conflictual remaking of institutions, consciousness, culture, and material life.
Legacy
Fanon became foundational for anti-colonial, Black radical, postcolonial, psychiatric, and decolonial thought, with continuing debate over violence, nation, gender, and humanism.