Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

At last a conspicuous gap in the literature has been addressed, and brilliantly so: Gibson & Beneduce guide us through Fanon’s explicitly psychiatric work in a way which reorients us to Fanon’s own radical history and to our own Fanonian historical moment. A path-breaking contribution to thinking the ‘psychic life of power’. – Derek Hook, Associate Professor of Psychology, Duquesne UniversityFirst of all, the writing is superb.  Second, the historical nuance and meticulous analysis make the book more than a work on Fanon’s psychiatric thought.  It’s a  political history of psychiatry both as a colonial and anti-colonial practice.   The former is its unfolding under colonial conditions.  The latter is the fact of agency among psychiatrists and psychologists from below … It’s a marvelous work (in its own right) of political psychology and even better: it addresses the lacunae in other works–namely, their failure to address colonization, race, and sexuality. – Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, University of ConnecticutFrantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics affords a much-needed and long-awaited addition to the literature on Frantz Fanon, an exhaustive study of the least-known aspect of his short but remarkable life, his psychiatric practice and publications. * Journal Of Applied Philosophy *

Roberto Beneduce is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Turin. He is the founding director of the Frantz Fanon Center in Turin. His recent publications include a collection of Fanon’s psychiatric writings in Italian, Decolonizzare la follia. Scritti sulla psichiatria coloniale (2011), and L’histoire au corps (Embodying History) (2016). In 2016 he edited a special issue of the journal Politique Africaine, “Mobilzer Fanon”.Nigel C. Gibson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Emerson College. He is author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003) and Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2014), and the editor of Rethinking Fanon (1999) and Living Fanon (2011). He is the editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies.