Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher whose writings on colonialism, racism, and liberation became foundational texts of postcolonial theory. Black Skin, White Masks applied psychoanalytic and existentialist frameworks to the experience of Black people under colonialism, arguing that the colonial system produces a fundamental alienation of Black selfhood that requires an active psychological and cultural decolonisation.

The Wretched of the Earth, written as Fanon was dying of leukaemia, argued that colonial violence could only be overcome through counter-violence, and that national liberation requires not just political independence but a complete transformation of consciousness. With a preface by Sartre, the book became the handbook of anti-colonial movements worldwide. Fanon remains the indispensable thinker for understanding colonial modernity and its aftermath.