The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a nonfiction book by Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher. Together with such texts as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), The Wretched of the Earth is a founding text of modern postcolonial studies. It is also Frantz Fanon’s most internationally acclaimed book, translated into more than 25 languages, though he is also known for Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which explores the psychology of the colonial subject.

Written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence, Wretched of the Earth analyzes the inner workings and various stages of the decolonization process, as well as passionately defending the need for violence in the anticolonial struggle. The book marked a turn in Fanon’s thinking from his earlier preoccupation with the problems of Blackness and Black oppression to a wider, global take on the struggle between Western countries and their colonies. Inspired by Marxism and Leninism, Fanon adapts the notion of class struggle to the racialized colonial

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