Frantz Fanon’s work in Western medicine and psychiatry fundamentally challenged and transformed our understanding of the relationship between the mental and the material. As both theorist and clinician, Fanon sought to show how psychiatric discourse, which he described as “one of the most tragic features of the colonial situation,” authorized itself to explain the effects of colonial violence on the subject in the colony and the plantation—while becoming, in the hands of Western medical experts, part of the colonial apparatus itself. How did Fanon theorize the psychological and the political? How did this, in turn, shape his analysis of subjectivity, violence and liberation?
In this course, we will examine Fanon’s idea about the “psychopolitical” through a close reading of selections from Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth. As we follow this idea (and its transformations) in his work, we’ll ask: how did his political commitments shape his clinical insights? How did the clinic inform his political theory and praxis? What does the Fanonian psychopolitical teach us about how cultural fantasies are realized through racial violence? What does it teach us about the relationship between racial trauma and history? Finally, what does his psychopolitics help us articulate about our present?
