Fanon, Frantz ZEUS LEONARDO University of California, Berkeley, USA Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary activist, psychiatrist, and intellectual during the decol- onization movement. A Martinican by birth, Fanon lef the Caribbean for France, where he completed his dissertation that would form the basis for Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 2008/1952). Arguably more popular, Te Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2005/1961) is thought by many to be a manifesto for the decolonization movement. He wrote two other books, Towards the African Revolution and A Dying Colonialism. A theorist as well as a revolutionary participant in social move- ments, Fanon’s political activities included the National Liberation Front (FLN). Tis entry focuses on Black Skin, White Masks (“Black Skin”) and Te Wretched of the Earth (“Wretched”). Fanon had several important infuences. Aimé Césaire, whose concept of nigrescence gained notoriety, proved decisive for the early Fanon. His collaboration and friend- ship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who explained that the anti-Semite created the Jew, would inform Fanon’s understanding of the rela- tionship between the colonizer and the colonized. Other precursors that Fanon’s thought engaged include Freud, Marx, and Hegel. For Fanon, these intellectuals were as ofen sympathetic fgures as they were targets of his critiques. He lived an international and intense, but short, life – he died of leukemia at the age of 37 in a Maryland hospital in the United States. An uncompromising rationalist, Fanon tackled what he called the “psycho-existential Te Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Teory. Edited by Bryan S. Turner. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0121 complex” of colonialism in Black Skin. Reduced by colonial violence, the colonized live in a Manichean world, a “sterile” and an “arid” place called the “zone of nonbeing.” A compartmentalized existence, the colonized’s lifeworld is defned by a fundamental lack: of value, goodness, and culture. Its opposite in the colonizer’s world may be summed up as civilization. Te colonized’s world is a failed attempt to mimic the colonizers’ ways, like appropriating their language, such as the Antilleans’ ability to speak French. Educated Antilleans may travel to France and put on the “mask” of speaking French but their return to the Antilles reminds them that they are black, betrayed by the fact of their black skin. Tey may transcend geographical, even cultural, lines, but do not cross from the zone of nonbe- ing into the zone of being. Te colonized and colonizer alike patronize them through com- pliments about their impressive speech. In this predicament, the colonized live an inau- thentic life marked and marred by the perpet- ual search for personhood that escapes them. Nothing short of decolonization restores their disalienation and authentication. Colonial conditions subvert black claims to a culture worthy of recognition, an iden- tity that is required by the colonized for self-actualization. Unlike whiteness, what Fanon calls blacks’ “destiny,” blackness does not provide an “ontological resistance” for the white colonizer. Tere is no mutual or reciprocal process of recognition between them wherein the self requires the other for diference and completion. In a colonial situation, the colonized remains as other, consumed as object or “thingifed” by the colonizer. Every attempt by the colonized to elicit recognition from the colonizer is frus- trated by the former’s corporeal condition, blackness. Fanon narrates black aspiration as