Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon's, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. A major influence on civil rights, anticolonial, and black consciousness movements internationally, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.
Martinique islander by birth and a psychiatrist by training, Franz Fanon is better known as a pan-African revolutionary ideologue. His treatises on colonialism call for revolutionary confrontation with malignant colonial regimes, where necessary on the battlefield, and, more important, for the eradication of the most invidious form of colonialism, namely, colonial mentality. Fanon holds that this mentality prevents the African and the black person everywhere even from being aware of the seriousness of the social and personal deprivations of his or her colonized status.
Fanon found his voice when he worked for the Algerian revolutionaries during the Algerian War of Independence against the French. Not only did he become deeply involved in the Algerian struggle, he also emerged as its principal ideologue and formulated his anticolonial writings from the Algerian experience.
