Author(s): Adam Shatz

History | Ethnicity, Race and Identity | Politics

A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for racial liberation

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of "dis-alienation" in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

Review: The Rebel's Clinic is a diligent, scrupulous, serious book. Adam Shatz keeps Fanon alive as one of us-a human being-not simply the larger-than-life subject of an academic study. This book offers a careful reconstruction of Fanon's times, especially the war in Algeria, and resonates at a moment when we are tragically no closer to solving the problems Fanon dedicated his life and writing to understanding. * John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon and Look for Me and I'll Be Gone *
Frantz Fanon has found his Isaac Deutscher in Adam Shatz. Politically and psychologically suave, The Rebel's Clinic is as illuminating on the tragic pattern of Fanon's private life as on the tumultuous continents through which he moved. It is also continuously insightful about Fanon's tormentingly complicated intellectual bequest on the crucial subjects of race and empire. * Pankaj Mishra, , author of Run and Hide and From the Ruins of Empire *
Adam Shatz offers a richly detailed account of the life and thought of Frantz Fanon. It is at once an intimate and unsparing portrait of the complexities of Fanon's life as psychiatrist and militant political activist, and a vivid depiction of the anti-colonial struggles in which he engaged. We get a close look at internal conflicts among revolutionaries, as Fanon makes his way from Martinique to Algeria to Africa. Shatz's masterful command of the history of that moment of promise in the early 1960s is compelling, indeed gripping reading. This is a book that gives deep insight not only into the life and times of Fanon, but also into the ways in which the history he lived was made. * Joan W. Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study *
More than a biography, Adam Shatz's The Rebel's Clinic is a rich and textured portrait of the intellectual and political worlds that shaped Frantz Fanon's life, ideas, and legacies. Readers who know Fanon's work intimately as well as those just discovering this iconic figure of Third World revolution will learn from this book. * Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination *
Adam Shatz sweeps us up in Franz Fanon's life-as-road movie, with a cast of characters and an array of settings that come alive on the page, from Sartre and Beauvoir in Copacabana to Patrice Lumumba in the suburbs of Leopoldville. At the same time, with his mastery of geopolitics and world-spanning ideas, he has given us an intellectual history of a century of revolutionary aspirations. The Rebel's Clinic is a what is to be done for our times. * Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Looking for The Stranger *
The Rebel's Clinic is a fascinating and enlightening read, one that will speak to many and that will help correct misconceptions about Fanon. This book not only provides a full picture of its subject; it also inspires the reader to apply Fanon's insights to situations that transcend his life and times. Adam Shatz has written an important book that speaks to our troubled and confusing moment. * Raja Shehadeh, Orwell Prize-winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I *
Fanon positioned his life on the frontlines of decolonization, determined to imagine how the world was to be decolonized and what it would look like. Shatz offers a brilliant reconstruction of Fanon's journeying from Martinique to Algeria. He tells a riveting story, his prose a thing of beauty. In his telling Fanon ceases to be a disembodied icon and becomes properly historical. Shatz's Fanon upholds the certainty of the militant while he ponders, at the same time, the meanings of the unconscious world. His nuanced and complex readings of Fanon's conception of political violence are a tour de force. Fanon was the most audacious interpreter of the age of decolonization: Shatz recovers him for our times. * Bill Schwarz, author of The White Man's World: Memories of Empire *

Author Biography: Adam Shatz is the US Editor of the London Review of Books, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. He also hosts the podcast Myself with Others, which explores the life of ideas and features guests within the arts, culture and literature. Shatz studied history at Columbia University, and has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.