Frantz Fanon: Disenchantment, Existentia

Through close reading of Frantz Fanon's early, mid-career, and late texts, the lectures of the course aim at presenting Fanon's intellectual trajectory starting with his engagement to fight for France as a tirailleur during the second World War and how his experience of racism in the French military disenchanted him about his standing within the French empire. Like most people from the French colonies, Fanon grasped from his military service that he is a second class citizen.

The lectures, then, engage Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as both a memoir which chronicles his disenchantment with France's promise of liberté égalité, et fraternité for all its citizens and a testament of France's anti-black racist practices which is informed by his experience of anti-black racism.

The lectures then engage with Fanon's writings about how his experiences as a psychiatrist caring for the patients of colonial mental illnesses led to his existential self-revision. 

Finally, the lectures focus on Fanon's magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) to draw out that it was the culmination of Fanon's disenchantment and existential self-revision as the mature expression of his philosophy that violence is a series of practices that French colonizers instilled in the colonies to engage with colonized people and that the logic of revolution requires that colonized people engage in these practices with the colonial establishment.