The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon has been dead since 1961, yet his name is invoked with increasing frequency, and has itself become a kind of Rorschach test in discussions of white supremacy, the Middle East, and settler-colonialism. In his talk at the Whitney Humanities Center, Adam Shatz, the author of a new biography of Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic, will reflect on the Martinican psychiatrist’s life, work, and contemporary legacy.

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”

About The Rebel’s Clinic
In the era of Black Lives Matter and the war in Gaza, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. This searching biography tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and Department of French