Frantz Fanon

Reviewed by: Frantz Fanon: A Biography Richard C. Keller David Macey . Frantz Fanon: A Biography. New York: Picador USA, 2001. xvi + 640 pp. Ill. $40.00 (0-312-27550-1). Frantz Fanon—psychiatrist and voice of the Algerian revolution—has long been a difficult subject for biographers. Disturbed by his advocacy of violence as a legitimate tactic of national liberation, scholars have focused on his reputation as a psychiatric reformer and a crusader against the endemic racism of French colonial medicine. Yet in describing him as a new incarnation of Philippe Pinel in the colonies, many have strained credulity by portraying him as a mythic figure. David Macey's exceptional study provides an important corrective. Following Fanon from his 1925 birth in Martinique, through his medical education in [End Page 156] France and his practice as a psychiatrist in Algeria, to his exile in Tunisia and death from leukemia in 1961, Macey presents the histories of multiple Fanons—writer, psychiatrist, and revolutionary—by situating them in elaborate historical contexts. The result is a book that tells not only Fanon's story, but also those of a Martinique stuck in its history of slavery and colonialism, a postwar France marked by profound racial tensions, and an Algeria in the throes of revolution. Macey's probing study emphasizes the important influences of these social and political environments for Fanon's intellectual development. After a relatively privileged upbringing in Martinique, racial stigmatization in France's purportedly color-blind society left an indelible mark on Fanon—an experience he captured in his phenomenological meditation, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), written while he was a medical student at Lyon. It was also in Lyon that he became aware of how colonial medicine had shaped attitudes toward North African immigrants in France: where his colleagues saw North African patients as simulators who presented with fraudulent complaints, Fanon insisted that they suffered from psychosomatic disorders related to the stresses of poverty and social dislocation. Historians of medicine will be most interested in Macey's account of Fanon's development as a psychiatrist. During Fanon's internship at France's Saint-Alban hospital, the reformist François Tosquelles introduced him to a progressive "institutional psychiatry" that emphasized the patient's social reintegration through group work. Fanon further developed such practices after taking up the post of ward director at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria in 1953, where he discovered the powerful influence of culture on therapeutic outcomes. Experiments with dressmaking, town meetings, and a hospital newspaper proved successful with European women patients, yet failed with Algerian men: only Fanon's establishment of a "Moorish café" that mimicked a Muslim homosocial environment achieved similar breakthroughs with these patients. These efforts were cut short with the outbreak of war in Algeria, as Fanon's increasing commitment to the National Liberation Front led to his renunciation of French citizenship and his exile in Tunis. It was there that he wrote his best-known work, The Wretched of the Earth, the study of nationalist revolution that includes his famous case studies on "Colonial Warfare and Mental Disorders." Too many biographies are concerned with capturing Fanon's legend, rather than his complex life story. Macey breaks with this tradition by employing new materials and interviews to capture a significantly more detailed picture of a Fanon whose life was informed by his immersion in a series of turbulent histories. Macey thus dispels a number of myths that have accumulated in the historical record. Stories about Fanon unchaining patients at Blida, for example, reflect others' impressions of his sensitivity toward North African patients rather than historical veracity. And although many historians and critics have labeled Fanon a psychoanalyst, Macey argues convincingly that he only dabbled in analysis, and indeed departed radically from many of its central tenets in his psychiatric practice. One small criticism is worth noting here: Macey's emphasis on situating Fanon leads in many places to a study that is long on context and short on Fanon [End Page 157] himself. Yet for someone who lived such a short life in such tumultuous circumstances, this is only to be expected, and will provide important grounding for nonspecialists eager to learn about

Art history · Biography · Colonialism · Ethnology · Martinique · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Sociology · Subject (documents) · West indies · Gender Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · Law · Neurology and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies

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