March 18, 2005

Is Frantz Fanon Still Relevant?

By HOMI K. BHABHA

Frantz Fanon's classic of decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in Paris in the fall of 1961, as the author lay dying of leukemia in a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.

Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon enlisted in the French Army in World War II, studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, then served as head of the psychiatric department in a French colonial hospital in Algeria. Alienated from France during the Algerian war, he quit