You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
This book was really dense for someone not versed in philosophy / psychology. Many of the conclusions were salient, but definitely interesting to read in a 2023 context (see sexism, etc.) The broad brushes of Fanon's theory of the colonized mind are good, just buried a little in a thick read.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
je ne devais lire que quelques chapitres pour un cours, mais il m'a paru nécessaire de lire le livre en entier. parce que la plume de Fanon est belle, mais aussi et surtout parce qu'il livre avec clarté les réalités de la condition noire dans un monde dominé par le blanc. un ouvrage et un auteur fondamentaux
The psychiatry stuff is often wonky and awkward to read – but the rest is absolute fire.
Certainly, the one thing we can say absolutely is that I am not educated enough to accurately review this book.
I am still not sure I understand what parts of this book were saying. Other parts made me recoil with revulsion and I'm still not sure what they meant. Other parts made me think hard.
This book is a... poetic essay on colonialism and how the colonial relationship psychologically impacts colonized peoples. It's translated from French, so that might influence why the language is ethereal and sometimes difficult to grasp. I'm not at all sure of the provenance of the psychological concepts, or whether things like dream analysis and Freudian sexuality hold up scientifically today.
I do know that this book took me completely out of my body and dunked me headfirst into concepts that I had never examined before. Here is an Aime Cesaire quote the author includes that should give you a glimpse:
I am still not sure I understand what parts of this book were saying. Other parts made me recoil with revulsion and I'm still not sure what they meant. Other parts made me think hard.
This book is a... poetic essay on colonialism and how the colonial relationship psychologically impacts colonized peoples. It's translated from French, so that might influence why the language is ethereal and sometimes difficult to grasp. I'm not at all sure of the provenance of the psychological concepts, or whether things like dream analysis and Freudian sexuality hold up scientifically today.
I do know that this book took me completely out of my body and dunked me headfirst into concepts that I had never examined before. Here is an Aime Cesaire quote the author includes that should give you a glimpse:
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind--it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.
It makes me sad how something written after WWII could still ring so true today. Has anything changed?!
Frantz Fanon totally called me out in some of these essays. I sat there with wide-open eyes like “How does he know?!” Too bad it was a library book, because I needed to do some serious underlining of !!!! sentences.
This is not an easy read (for multiple reasons). I definitely didn’t agree with a lot of Fanon’s commentary and I definitely liked/connected with some essays more than others. I also just changed “Black man” to “Black people” in my head, which also worked better in some essays compared to the others (some weird gender commentary there, Fanon :/).
But I found at least one eye-opening line in all of them. Pardon me, I’m just gonna be sitting here re-examining my life….
Frantz Fanon totally called me out in some of these essays. I sat there with wide-open eyes like “How does he know?!” Too bad it was a library book, because I needed to do some serious underlining of !!!! sentences.
This is not an easy read (for multiple reasons). I definitely didn’t agree with a lot of Fanon’s commentary and I definitely liked/connected with some essays more than others. I also just changed “Black man” to “Black people” in my head, which also worked better in some essays compared to the others (some weird gender commentary there, Fanon :/).
But I found at least one eye-opening line in all of them. Pardon me, I’m just gonna be sitting here re-examining my life….
This was a very difficult book to read. I didnt understand a lot of the references it was making and the language was really complicated. But with that aside it was very eye opening. Also it was written in 1952?? INSANE.
challenging
