Having completed his medical studies, Fanon took up a position at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in November 1953. The book draws upon Fanon’s training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis but also upon Marxism, existentialism, the work of the négritude movement, and a number of literary texts in order to analyze the lived experience of racism. Black Skin, White Masks captures Fanon’s experience as a native of Martinique and thus as the product of a colonial education who came to experience metropolitan racism upon his arrival in France (Fanon, having fought in Europe during the Second World War, returned to France to study medicine). These two books encapsulate the major themes not only of Fanon’s writing but also of his extraordinary life. In his short lifetime, he produced two enduring books: Black Skin, White Masks ( Peau noire, masques blancs), still regarded as the preeminent study of the lived experience of racism, and The Wretched of the Earth ( Les damnés de la terre), regarded at the time of its publication as “the handbook of decolonization,” and presenting itself to us today as both a clear-eyed prediction of the lasting legacy of neocolonialism, and as a visionary account of a truly postcolonial condition yet to come. Frantz Fanon (b. 1925–d. 1961)-psychiatrist, political theorist, poet, polemicist, diplomat, journalist, soldier, doctor, playwright, revolutionary-is one of the foremost writers of the 20th century on the topics of racism, colonialism, and decolonization.
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