Black Skin, White Masks

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis'Fanon is our contemporary ... In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah LevyFrantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker. 'So hard to put down ... a brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair' The New York Times Book Review

This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism, Fanon is our contemporary because when he psychoanalysed the way the French coloniser looked at Arabs, he is also describing the way the police looked at Stephen Lawrence. In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism, and how some of us have been staged in its psychodrama, A brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair. . . He demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images. . . It is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellectual, who makes the book so hard to put down

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique and studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. Sent to a hospital in Algeria, he found his sympathies turning towards the Algerian Nationalist Movement, which he later joined. He is considered one of the most important theorists of the psychology of race and his books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have been extremely influential.