Frantz Fanon: The Life and Works w/ Lou Turner (AR&D Ep.12)

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Huckamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckamacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. It's nice to see you. It's been a while since we've seen each other, but it's nice to see you again. How are you doing?

Adnan Hussain: I'm doing well. It really has been a while. It's delightful to be with you. Looking forward to this conversation.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. We have a really fascinating discussion planned today, one that we've been planning for a long time, but we wanted to get it into the confines of our African Revolutions and Decolonization series. And so now that we have this series going on actively, it's the right time for this conversation. But before I introduce the topic and I introduce the fantastic guests that we have with us today for the conversation, I'd like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E R-R-I-L-L-A history. And you can follow the show on various social media platforms. I have problems logging in and posting things these days, but you can find the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod, Instagram Gorilla underscore history. And we have an email newsletter, Gorilla history dot substack dot com. And in all of those cases, Gorilla is spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A with two L's or two R's and two L's. So with that out of the way, I'd like to introduce our guest for this conversation that we're going to be having on France Fanon. We have Professor Lou Turner. Professor Turner is a clinical professor in urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hello, Professor. I'll call you Lou from here on because I know that you told me to do that. Thank you very much. How are you doing, Lou? Nice to have you on the show.

Lou Turner: Doing well. A little tired from a field trip with my class yesterday to Chicago, but doing well and looking forward to this discussion.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. I'm sure that the topic that we have in front of us today will bring your energy right back up because the topic for today is Frantz Fanon. So, listeners... 2025, as we are recording this episode, is the 100th anniversary of Frantz Fanon's birth. Now, Frantz Fanon, of course, we have referenced numerous times throughout the show's history from, I believe, the very first episode of the show all the way through today. And we haven't had a dedicated episode to Frantz Fanon yet. As I mentioned, we thought that this would fit really well within the African Revolutions and Decolonization series that we have going on right now on Guerrilla History. And just a reminder, listeners, that if you haven't been listening to the African Revolutions and Decolonization series, you can find that on the Guerrilla History feed wherever you get podcasts. With that being said, we are going to be breaking this conversation into three parts. We're first going to be discussing the life of Frantz Fanon, moving into the works that Frantz Fanon wrote. And then at the end, and particularly salient, is Frantz Fanon's legacies. Now, as we mentioned, with this 100th anniversary, we have seen Frantz Fanon used in many different places and by many different people from kind of divergent tendencies in many cases and being used in different ways. And so thinking about the legacies that Fanon has left us and the ways in which Fanon is being used today is a particularly interesting question. But before we get into the first question, which will be regarding Fanon's life, Lou, I want to ask you this. By way of introducing yourself, I guess, how did you become acquainted with Fanon's work? And then can you also tell the listeners a little bit about the work that you've been doing in Fanon since that time?

Lou Turner: Well, I became familiar with Frantz Fanon in my senior year in high school, believe it or not, which was... to date myself, was 1968. And it's important to note that the first mass production of Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth or Damned of the Earth was published in 1965 by Grove Press. And the edition that I use was the 1968 edition when I read it in high school and then in college, mostly in college at Howard University my freshman year. But that 1965 and 68 edition, by the way, and I always make this point, went through and so far as I've collected, I think I have maybe 17 or 18 printings of the first edition. 17 or 18 printings of the first English language edition by Grove Press. I mean, it was a horrible edition. It was one of these little pocketbook things. And the binding always falls apart. And I have like a half dozen of them. So this thing went through like... 17 or 18 editions, the first, you know, printings, 17, 18 printings of the first edition. And so they were just flying off the shelves over and over. And Grove Press, which is a kind of semi-movement press, had to keep printing editions of it. And I was one of those people. So in my senior year in high school, freshman year at Howard University, and I went to Howard University because there was a student movement there at Howard. Actually, I turned down a four year scholarship to Cornell to go to Howard. Because in the late 1960s, that's what you did for the movement. That's how you became socialized in the radical movement. And believe it or not, the issue at Howard, and it's hard to believe this, I know people kind of kind of raised their eyebrows. The issue at Howard we had was to bring Black studies to a Black university. It was crazy. And in fact, Nathan Hare, who was a sociologist at Howard, who solidarized with the students, was fired by the Howard University administration. He went to San Francisco State and started the first Black studies program. And so that's when I first read Fanon was in the context of the Black student movement. And that's remained with me to this day. And I often make the point that Fanon's first home was the United States and the Black Movement. It was not France, it was not Africa, still is in Africa, and it was not the Caribbean, which is where he was from. When Wretched of the Earth came out in French, it was immediately banned by De Gaulle, the De Gaulle government in France. And Fanon has never really struck deep roots until you get to the Black Consciousness Movement in the late 1970s and early 80s with Steve Biko, really, really never struck many roots in Africa because of this critique of neocolonialism. And the same thing in the Caribbean. But in the United States, the Black Panther Party, other organizations, student movements, Fanon's home was in the Black movement in the United States. Even Martin Luther King, I've noted, I think I figured out, read Fanon. Fanon, King gave a speech in 1967, a year before he was assassinated, to the American Psychological Association on the role of the social scientists in the freedom movement. And he changes his view about urban insurrections in this speech. And he sounds very Fanonia. But he read everything. So I'm sorry he read that same Grove Press edition of Wretched of the Earth. Although we often use Fanon as a counterbalance to King and nonviolence. But it's clear that King, I think, I think I can prove that King had read Fanon as well.

Henry Huckamacki: Very small comment before Adnan comes in with the next question. I also have that same 1968 edition from Grove Press. I believe I actually got it here in Russia. So very interesting to think about the ways that things move. But as you mentioned, and this is the kind of funny note, you said it was a terrible printing with a very pulp paper and the binding always falls apart. I'm missing a lot of pages, but fortunately they're all from Satra's, And they're not from Fanani himself. It's like I have two pages of the preface and the rest has fallen out. But all of the actual text of Wretched of the Earth is still there. So I can still use that old Falling Apart 1968 edition. We're not video. I would love to hold it up on camera for people to see. But it's on my desk at work right now, actually. But maybe I'll send a picture to you afterwards, Lou. But I'm sure it looks similar to the ones you have.

Lou Turner: And by the way, the wretched of the earth, the damned of the earth, comes from the first line of the International. Arise, you prisoners of starvation. Arise, you the wretched of the earth. Absolutely.

Henry Huckamacki: Adnan, over to you.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, just, you know, I have one of those Grove ones, too. I don't know if it's 68, but I don't think they improved the binding for years. It has the same problem. But I think it's actually really hilariously appropriate, actually, Henry, that the SART introduction has fallen out.

Henry Huckamacki: It's ironic when fitting.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, when we talk about the legacy, maybe we'll want to talk a little bit about the framing, you know, of Fanon through Sartre and the consequences of that. But before we get to any of that, let's talk a little bit about Frantz Fanon's life, because it itself is extremely interesting and illustrative of age and the era and the spirit of decolonization and of radical revolutionary politics. And so maybe we could start by just asking about his early life and which he, you know, often talks about in some of his His life in the Caribbean, one of these French colonial islands of Martinique. You know, what can we learn from and appreciate about Fanon's childhood and context growing up, you know, in the Caribbean, in a French colonial possession like Martinique?

Lou Turner: Well, you'll find much of it already in his first book, Black Skin, White Mask, which in the French was published in 1952, which by the way- He submitted it, and I believe David Macy makes this point in his biography of Fanon, that Fanon had submitted Black Skin, White Masks as his dissertation thesis at the University of Lyon that was turned down by his colleagues. Just by his dissertation supervisor, who is an interesting man himself. I've written a little bit about Fanon at the University of Lyon. And so then he had to write a technical dissertation that was accepted. It, too, was finally published in a compilation, a big compilation that came out in 2018 called Alienation and Freedom. by Robert Young and John Kalfa. And they published a lot of Fanon's clinical papers, which I've also written about and edited a book on Fanonian clinical practices with a colleague here. But his dissertation appears in Alienation and Freedom, as well as two plays that he wrote. And from Fanon's brother's memoir, Joby Fanon, you know, his older brother, Fanon knew he was dying at the end of his life, dying of leukemia. And he asked Joby to burn the plays. And Joby didn't. And that's how we have that's how we we have them.

Adnan Hussain: But, you know, that's so that's so interesting because I believe fairly recently, you know, we have C.L.R. James's play that was a precursor. It's even before he wrote the Black Jacobins. He wrote a play on the H's revolution. Right. Yeah, Toussaint Louverture. And of course, Henry and I have an episode where we interviewed the author and illustrators of the graphic novel version based on the work of C.L.R. James, the play, you know. So it seems that there was something interesting about these radical, revolutionary, anti-colonial thinkers that they had a flair for the dramatic and at least the interesting.

Lou Turner: Yeah, exactly. And Fanon definitely had that. One of the things I've also found in terms of drama, that Fanon has a trope in Wretched of the Earth of screens. in Chapter 3 on pitfalls of national consciousness. He used it earlier in Chapter 2 as well. But a screen that, for instance, the leader provides for the national bourgeoisie between the national bourgeoisie and the people. And so the leader provides a screen, and then the party provides a screen for this. So there's this whole thing about this whole trope of screens. Turns out, I had it backwards for a long time. I thought that Jean Genet's play, The Screens, on the Algerian Revolution, that Genet got it from Fanon. It's actually the other way around, that Genet's play came out before Wretched of the Earth. And so it may have been the other way around. So the way he uses screens theoretically as a theoretical trope in understanding post-colonial society is very, very interesting as well. And again, it's drama, you know, with Genet. So it's fascinating. He was very much into the theater. Also from Black Skin, White Mask, he was very much into cinema. He does a lot on films in black skin, white mask. And even in Wretched of the Earth, the last work, when he was writing, when he knew he was dying, there are in a couple of places a play. He inserts parts of a play. in this highly political, theoretical work in Wretched of the Earth. So he's very much interested in the theater. But on Martinique, Martinique is interesting. And one can't simply say Fanon is from Martinique or Caribbean Island. Fanon is from Martinique or Caribbean Island, that came under occupation of the Vichy, the French Vichy government. In fact, the French Navy was anchored in Martinique. And while it may be true that Fanon first came, and he writes about this, came into contact with French racism because of that occupation, he nevertheless joined the Free French Army underage. to fight against fascism, and then was shipped off, interestingly enough, to North Africa to fight. And interesting because he then returns to North Africa, but also was wounded in the campaign in North Africa. And it's funny, I was reading something recently where... Fanon argues with his parents about why he was leaving to fight fascism to defend democracy. Then he goes to fight against fascism in the French. And then he writes after they may have been from the hospital that he's been wounded. He says, he tells his parents that they were right. that he shouldn't get involved in this thing between these white people, these nations and whatnot. And he writes back. He's a young man, very young man. I mean, he was, you know, like 17 or something when he goes off. And he admits that his parents were right. So this letter to his parents is like one of the first times we see this anti-colonial turn, so to speak, in real time in a letter. That he had written to his parents.

Henry Huckamacki: I want to add a small additional question here on this specific point, which is regarding, as you mentioned, he was fighting with the French against fascism. And was wounded. And it was at this moment that he started to take on anti-colonial ideas. One of the things that he talks about at this time is how he witnessed the treatment of the colonial soldiers, particularly Senegalese soldiers that were fighting with the French against fascism. Can you talk a little bit about that? you know, what was going through his mind as he was witnessing this treatment of the colonial soldiers that, you know, nominally were standing shoulder to shoulder with the French, the white French soldiers from France itself. But at the same time, seeing this obscene treatment, and of course we've talked in other places about the massacres that the French have carried out of their colonial troops like Camp de Thierry in Senegal itself. But what was it about what Fanon witnessed that actually drove him to beginning to change the way that he was seeing the situation, the way that he analyzed the world?

Lou Turner: Well, you'd have to begin before he even goes to Algeria. And in black skin, white mass, he psychoanalyzes everything.

Adnan Hussain: this process.

Lou Turner: I discovered something, I'll circle back to it. A couple years ago, I was stopping by a coffee shop to get some coffee as a drive-thru. The young woman, young white woman, student at the university working there, putting the certainty to coffee, and she had a t-shirt on that said, Madagascar. And I asked her, I said, so what do you know about Madagascar? And she said, oh, I spent a year there, whatnot. And on the shirt was a bull, the head of a bull. And I guess the second time or third time I came through, you know, different days or whatnot, I finally asked her, so what is the bull about in Madagascar? She said, oh, that's the symbol of the province I was living in, working in. Now, the bull appears in black skin, white mask in the dreams of the Malagasy, the Madagascans. And Fanon analyzes the symbol of the bull as being the Senegalese that were sent by the French to suppress the Madagascan rebellion of 1947. When the first genocides after World War II, the 100,000 Madagascans were killed by the French. And Fanon is analyzing and saying, well, the bull was represented, you know, the dream was, and it's actually a waking dream because this is trauma he's talking about. He says, well, the bull represents the Madagascan. Turns out sometimes a banana is just a banana because the bull was also a symbol of of this province and Madagascar. And it really was just a year ago that this dawned on me about something that I've thought about for many, many years in reading Fanon. And so the connection in 19, even before 1952, the essays that he's writing for Black Skin, White Mask is he sees the role of the French form of colonialism, which is very, very dastardly, I mean, to say the least, and it's complicated. And this is where we get to the question that I raised earlier. Can non-revolutionaries write about revolutionaries like Fanon? And Fanon knew this. The French used Madagascar, used Senegalese to suppress other colonial peoples. the so-called French community, whatever. And so he first deals with this in terms of the Octave Manoni's work, The Psychology of Colonization. Octave Manoni was a French... You know, he delved in psychoanalysts, very much influenced by existentialism, but he was an anthropologist. He worked for the, you know, he was a civil servant for the French. He went to investigate Madagascar. He wrote this book called, again, with the question of drama in place, he writes this book called Prospero en Calavera. after the characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. And Fanon devotes a whole chapter of Black Skin, White Mask to it. But it's about Madagascar and the French colonial genocide in Madagascar. This is where it gets tricky, guys. Who are the political parties in power in France? at the time in post-World War II France, before de Gaulle comes to power in 1958. Socialists. So we're talking about socialist colonial imperialism. And so when people write about this, they say, well, the French, the French, but rarely do they ever talk about the political parties who are in power. And in fact, it was the socialists that give the FLN, the Algerians, a run for their money because they're very familiar with left ideology. And so they put the FLN on their back foot a lot of times in the struggle ideologically because they're very familiar with it. So don't get it twisted. You know, we think, we say colonialism and colonialism, we have an image of who the colonialists are. But it's a very different issue when it comes to certainly the French. And in fact, when Degas comes to power, it comes through a colonial coup. the colonists in Algeria. Because they were afraid that the left or whoever, liberal or socialist party would come to an agreement with the FLN that the colonialists in Algeria wouldn't like, say, carry out this coup and put the Gaul in power. But it's for known and the way we have to understand the peculiar nature the peculiar nature of French colonialism, I think is yet to really be hashed out, given all the articles written about him, all the biographies that are written about him. I just reviewed a new book by a guy by the name of Haddour, H-A-D-D-O-U-R, on Fanoni. When he goes into the French colonial archives, it's one of the first kind of primary source analysis of, of Fanon, uh, and unpacks, um, and I suggest you get in touch with him, unpacks the nature of French colonialism. And he has this whole kind of public health analysis, not because he has it, because the French is, it's called Cordon Sanitaire, that the French colonialists create this idea of the Cologne Sanitaire, uh, a, um, a sanitary cordon between the French colonizers and the French colonized. Thus, the issue that underlies this notion that Fanon has about the colonial society being a Manichean society. It's about the idea of creating some kind of sanitary separation between the races, between the colonized and the colonized.

Henry Huckamacki: Adnan, I'll let you go in with the next question about Fanon's life. But speaking of the Cordon Sanitaire, was it Ali Qadri that we had a discussion about Cordon Sanitaire with in the past? Do you remember, Adnan?

Adnan Hussain: Well, I mean, it's a major concept. I mean, of course, it's come up from segregation of populations as, you know, on the basis of public health as the discursive one. But then it's also, of course, deeply involved with racial hierarchies and the idea that, you know, there's a tainting if you mix these populations, you know, like you could lose French identity and so forth. But... Yeah, he may have spoken to us about it in one of our conversations about the political astronomy of waste.

Henry Huckamacki: It's one of his books, The Cordon Sanitaire, A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World.

Adnan Hussain: That's right. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, so just to continue with some of the... you know, kind of background to Fanon's activities. So even before he is posted in Algeria, he's had experience from, you know, his military service during... And as you said, he's injured there. And he's very familiar, it seems, in this early period with these occasions right after the war of... colonial genocidal violence against subject populations. What was interesting was something about how the colonial troops under, you know, the Senegalese were used to put down other, you know, colonized peoples. And so we can see that he was aware of and had witnessed, you know, the kind of complicated uses of colonialism you know um to maintain the french dominance and the politics around um conflicts among colonized peoples um and i think that's something that he discusses a little bit in wretched of the earth when he talks about the way in which under the colonial period you have a lot of um You know, conflict within, you know, there's crime and violence that, you know, takes place within the society, these kind of petty criminals and, you know, the subordination of, you know, colonial violence is sublimated in a way through these like internecine kind of conflicts. And it's only when you achieve some kind of political consciousness and direct this against the colonizer that you can actually overcome and sort of heal these conflicts. kind of divisions. So that makes me wonder about his time period, even before he gets involved, say, in the FLN in Algeria. So after he received his education, you alluded to him studying at Lyon and his thesis being rejected and having to write a different one. So we can, you know, gather that he spent some time in France. He was getting, you know, his degree. He's a A doctor, a psychiatrist. And a surgeon. And a surgeon. Okay. I remembered that about him, too. Yeah. So he was doing medical training and so forth in France. But as part of that, he ends up being posted, I believe, to Algeria and works in a colonial government, you know, hospital. Yeah. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about this era of his life, you know, after those early adventures. But now, through his education, he's a young man and a professional. And how does this experience, you know— You could certainly tell us about experiencing racism in France as a student, but also how his observations of Algeria as a colonial society form and shape him. And what are his activities that he's doing in Algeria as a young doctor?

Lou Turner: We'd have to back up a little bit to his time in France and particularly in Lyon.

Adnan Hussain: He leaves Paris.

Lou Turner: He gets pretty alienated in Paris, says some pretty rude things about living in Paris and goes up to Lyon to study there. But In France, he does write very important work called The North African Syndrome. And he's talking about North African immigrants in France. And I've since found a lot of interesting, well, some interesting articles on North African immigrants in France at the time and how they were viewed as immigrants either outside or within or a subsector of the French proletariat.

Adnan Hussain: And that essay has been published, right, in English, is in English translation, towards the African Revolution collection.

Lou Turner: Yeah, towards the African Revolution collection. And there's been some more recent discussion in Fanon's studies of that essay, which are interesting given a number of the issues around immigration, not only here in the United States, but particularly in Europe. So I think Fanon has a lot to teach us in terms of immigration. One of the things, just to talk a little bit back and forth, one of the books that I wrote, let's see, I always forget the title, Frantz Fanon's Therapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work, Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities. And There used to be more, but there still are Fanon centers around the world. And one we found in Turin, Italy, the Fanon Center in Turin, Italy. It's run by a very interesting Fanon scholar, Roberto Beneducci. And one of their areas of work is dealing with immigrants coming across the Mediterranean. It's an area of their work. of their practice, and they practice euphononian psychotherapeutic practices and whatnot. Found an interesting, when we were writing the book, the websites are no longer up. I wish they were, but when we first began writing this book, we found three websites Fanon centers in Rwanda, and they were practicing what's called sociotherapy, which is the reason why I say you got to back up a little bit to Lyon. Fanon gets his degree from the University of Lyon, but he does an internship in St. Albans in a... a clinic there which was run by this rather revolutionary psychoanalyst whose name is blurred right out of my head because I'm talking too fast. But he had been, he had been involved in the Spanish Revolution, had been imprisoned in, in, in France under German occupation, and then started or became part of this clinic. And he developed this whole concept or therapeutic practice called sociotherapy, in which he felt that patients had to be connected to their communities. You couldn't separate them out into a clinic. separate from their community, they had to be integrated into their social, cultural surroundings. And this is what Fanon learned, and this is what you see replicated or articulated in Black Skin, White Masks. And so a lot of Fanon's studies research looks at Fanon as a practitioner of this sociotherapy. It was called institutional therapy. Fanon gave it the term sociotherapy, in which Fanon kind of deprivileges the significance of psychology for the socioeconomic analysis of the society in which people live. He thought that that was as important, if not more important, than simply the psychological analysis. And so Fanon comes from that background. So when he comes to Algeria, by the way, he could have gone back to Martinique But he turns that down to go to Algeria. And there is this, some of it's kind of mythical, but whatever. There's this image of Fanon coming into the Blighted Joinville Hospital, which is one of the biggest psychiatric hospitals in Africa. And kind of, I forget the name of the famous French psychologist who unchanged the patients from the walls and whatnot and begins to treat them as human beings. There's a myth about Fanon doing similar things, that what's called the Algerian school or the Algiers school of psychology, treat it was a colonial practice of psychology by a guy by the name of Antoine Perrault, Dr. Antoine Perrault, in which they virtually did. He felt that Algerians were inferior and had a whole theory about it. And so Fanon comes in and seemingly, at least metaphorically, untrains the patients from this psychological, this colonial psychological practice of the Peron School or the Algiers School of Psychology. So he revolutionized the clinical practices in that hospital and developed, I've written a piece about it, looking at how he integrates people back into their communities and how he saw psychiatry in a very different way. In fact, in one of his clinical papers, which we now have, where he practices this sociotherapy on a Muslim men's ward and it fails. And he writes up why it failed. And one of his interns later writes a book, Alice Cherky, about it. And she writes that one of his interns, colleagues, younger colleagues, asking, so why do you think it failed? And he famously says, psychiatry has to be political. And that's the title of my essay, by the way, Psychiatry Has to Be Political. And I suspect, and I think I get this from Alice Cherky, I think she doesn't say it explicitly, she certainly implies it, and I say it explicitly, that Fanon practices creative failure. failure. I think he knew it was going to fail. I think he knew that black-skinned white mass wasn't going to be accepted as his dissertation thesis, but it's in order to prove the existence and the nature of colonialism. Because the sociotherapy that he was practicing on a Muslim men's ward was essentially inculcating French culture into social culture on the Muslim men's ward, and it failed. This is at the time when Mitterrand, who was the head of colonialism for the French government, remember, Mitterrand later becomes the president of France, is a socialist party person, right? Mitterrand is the one who famously says Algeria is France or is French. This is at the time he's saying this. And by this failure to actually use the sociotherapy of French culture in a Muslim men's ward, the failure of it, improves, I think, I argue, is that Fanon is showing that Algeria is not French. He can't use that. And then he has a whole thing where he talks about what they did to revise what they were doing. And even almost an accidental observation by one of the staff people who saw this this Muslim patient carrying a shovel through the hall and going up into the yard. And she follows the guy and he was out there helping this other guy plant a garden. And Fanon then began to study and analyze land tenure in Algeria, indigenous land tenure. There's a whole analysis of indigenous land tenure before and after French colonialism and whatnot, and then inculcates gardening as part of the therapy, creates a cafe where guys sit around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking politics as part of the therapy, because that's what happens. in a Muslim society and whatnot. So he begins bringing in, and for Muslim women patients, begins bringing in Islamic storytellers, Muslim storytellers, telling stories and whatnot. And the patients all respond to this stuff versus the agitation that he analyzes, that the clinic creates, that when you bring in the indigenous culture, the patients respond to it. He also created annexes in different parts of the country where patients would return home, but they could also have immediate care rather than traveling to the city and whatnot in that distance. So he did a lot of innovation did this whole thing with day therapy and whatnot, where you come in during the day and then you leave and go back home and whatnot. Did a lot of innovation in therapy in which the culture of people becomes part of their therapy. And to me, that's kind of the the origin of his view of decolonization. And I've changed my mind. Back in the 70s and 80s and stuff, we were reading Fanon. Everybody thought, and you can just find just waves of this writing, that Fanon's politics influenced his therapy. I've come to the other side of the question. His therapy influenced his politics, right? because he's trying to liberate a society and its psychology from colonialism. And he was already practicing it in what he calls the neo-society of the clinic that he was creating, the new society that he was creating in the clinic.

Adnan Hussain: That's fascinating because, you know, there is this whole trend during that period, like Goffman studying total institutions, prisons, clinics, mental institutions and things like that. And, you know, doing a kind of sociology of it. But what I find fascinating here is. two things that you've mentioned. One, that the clinical experience and the psychological work that he does ends up informing and patterning some key components of his decolonial political theory. But two, also how important an insight it is for him and for the larger work and where he stands vis-a-vis Western leftist theory and Marxism. in recognizing the limits of universalizing theory, practice, and approaches that come from, you know, Western historical experience. So sociotherapy sounds like it should be good, but if you are, you know, universalizing from, as the French always do, you know, with their mission civilatrice, you know, like culture is the French culture and we just need to universalize it. Right. So he recognizes the limits of that early on and then tries to incorporate practice that builds from the experience of the people, you know, concerned. In this case, the indigenous colonial culture and build theory from that experience and practice and clinical. That is actually very fascinating because he has this chapter, you know, I had not known that he had so much more clinical material that could be studied and examined, as you've been doing in your work, because, you know, you just get this one chapter in, you know, Colonial Mental Disorders, Chapter 5, I think it is, in Wretched of the Earth, and they're very interesting examples, and I always felt that it was an understudied chapter when it came to thinking about Wretched of the Earth, but to think that there is actually also a vast... you know, kind of trove of material. That's fascinating. I wonder if maybe you have other thoughts about elaborating that point that you said that, you know, his politics may have come from. What aspects do you think his psychological and clinical work may have really particularly led to in his theory of decolonization?

Henry Huckamacki: And just to add in on that point. So also, this is mostly to orient the listeners that we're talking about the period where he was appointed as the head of the psychiatry department at Bleda Joinville Hospital in 1953. The Algerian Revolution begins in 1954. And in his role there, he has to treat Both sides, the torturers of the French torturers with their own psychoses as a result of the torture, as well as the Algerians. And this continues for a couple of years before he resigns. And so not only is he looking at it from. This kind of social psychiatric view, but also he's viewing what is happening during this revolutionary process and is being forced in his role. I mean, he. He may have done it voluntarily, you know, being a physician and having taken this oath. But, you know, as his position as the head of the psychiatry department, he's treating both sides of this conflict, which gives him additional insights, which, of course, come up throughout his work, which we'll talk about in the next section. But just to orient the listeners that that is also happening at this time.

Lou Turner: Yeah. Let me give you an example of one of the clinical papers that he writes. This is a clinical paper on Muslim women in the hospital. And it's based on a psychometric study called TAT, the thematic apperception test. thematic apperception test. And it's kind of like, it's kind of a cousin to Rorschach test. You have a blotch on a card and you got to say what it brings or in another version of it with another cousin of it would be the doll study that was done by Kenneth and Mamie Clark. for the Brown v. Board of Education case in the Supreme Court in the United States. In other words, showing Black children, looking at the impact of segregation on the psychology of Black children. They showed a white doll and a Black doll. Which one do they associate with? And you have Black children pointing to the white doll and not associating with it. with the black dog so it's there's a number of these tests this one is called the thematic apperception test and it was given to Muslim women at Blight of Joinville in the Yeah, because he also was a physician in Tunis, in Tunisia, after the Battle of Algiers, and he had to get out of Dodge. But on each of these cards, you have a figure, you know, it's a representative figure of a person in the midst of doing an action. And it's shown to the patient, the card, and the patient has to say, what is the next thing that the figure is going to do? And the thing fails again. It's out of these failures. And what they come back with is the women said, only Allah knows the future. Then it turns out when I investigate this, these tests have been used not only all over Africa and actually other parts of the third world. I think there's one in the Philippines was used. It was also used in the United States and they almost all failed. And so what people did, what the psychiatrists did, that they revised it, they reformulated it to fit the culture. But this is just, again, from the failure of this test, using westernized medical psychiatric tests, it was to prove the effects of colonialism on the minds and the psychology of the colonized. And so there was that. The one on the Muslim men's ward, by the way, his going back and rethinking it, is a fascinating paper. And this is weird. This is really kind of spooky. He writes about traditional historical Algerian land tenure and the ways in which Marx wrote about Algerian land tenure. Marx, at the end of his life, was writing on North Africa. He also went to Algeria at the end of his life. We have his letters. He's writing back to his daughters from Algeria. His wife had died. He got very sick. And his doctor said, you know, send him to Algeria for the cure and whatnot. And we have these letters from Marx. And Marx was writing. And even before then, I think he writes some letters to the Angles on this letter. I think he's either a Russian or a French proto-sociologist who writes on North Africa and on land tenure. And Marx is commenting on this guy's book on land tenure. And you read it next to what Fanon is saying about land tenure. It's scary that they were coming to similar conclusions. And then you add to it, I don't know if your listeners know what the Dawes Act is. The Dawes Act is how they expropriated Native American land. And the French were doing the same thing. They imposed private property as the construct and all the land that, you know, a private property for each family and all the land that's left over. goes to the colonizers or goes to the, to the settlers. That was what the Dawes Act did. And the French were doing the same thing. And Fanon and Marx earlier are picking up on the very same thing. It's, it's, it's crazy. So there's a lot of stuff in Fanon's studies about whether it was Fanon a Marxist or not. You know, I get into that in other ways, but, Anyway, it's to see that because he comes from the socioeconomic perspective in looking at psychology, You know, he he has a historical materialist foundation for his psychology as well. So those are some of the practices. They say he also did forensic psychology is brought in to by the French because he's a civil servant of France. to see if an Algerian prisoner can be tried for a murder and whatnot. It's a clinical paper about confession. And the defendant confesses initially. I assume it was a murder or an attack or something on another Algerian. I think you brought up earlier what Fanon talks about in the chapter on violence of the colonized versus colonized violence that he talks about. But this is a case. And so the defendant confesses and Fanon goes, but then he ends up recanting his confession. Now, he confesses under the impact of the thinking of a colonizer and because of the culture of taking responsibility for what he did as to be a part, again, of his society. But then he sees... He recants the confession as a form of resistance to French colonialism. And so Fanon is interpreting all of these moves in the psyche of the colonized as forms of anti-colonial struggle. And when he talks about the torture, and I also bring this up, people right away talk about the violence, violence, violence, violence. The bookends of Wretched of the Earth is on violence and torture is the end. And so if we're going to talk about violence, and so he talks about torture, and he has this beautiful statement where he says, we taught Algerians who get arrested and are tortured, he says, just lean on your torturer. to remind them that they're human. and that they're engaged in an unhuman, dehumanized thing. And because he has these two guys who are torturers who come for therapy, and Fanon says, listen, man, you need to go stay silent. You need to get out of here because this is a... And so the one guy does, because this guy is beating up his children and his wife and whatnot. And the second guy, he turns down the advice. He says, I just want you to help me be better at my job. So you have these two attitudes. So Fanon treats the tortured and the torturers as well. As you said, Henry, he also famously wrote a resignation letter in 1956. So the Battle of Algiers happens and Everybody, the FLN, everybody has to get out of Dodge. And they go to Tunis, to Tunisia. But his friend, and one of the things I have that I've written about as well, some people are starting to take this up. It's a guy by the name of Abeni Ramdani, who was the principal leader in the FLN. in fact, the principal leader of the FLN, who Fanon took as a mentor in many ways. And the idea that Algeria, both for Ramdani and Fanon, would be a social democratic republic was what happened to them. This gets into the messy part, just like socialist colonialism does. Ramdani was assassinated. from within the FLN due to the fratricidal fights, struggles within the FLN. And there's some things that both Fanon wrote as a journalist for the FLN newspaper and that Abaini himself had written because people think of the FLN as some kind of monolithic organization. It was riven with different ideological tendency. So he was taken out by an Islamist tendency in the FLN, so far as we know.

Henry Huckamacki: You mentioned this famous resignation letter from 1956. In this letter, he resigns and also declares his allegiance to the Algerian cause, and then, of course, becomes very involved with the Algerian cause, which is... I think for many of our listeners, probably the part of the of his life that they're most familiar with, but also probably the part that we most should be telling, because this is also the same period where he has his most prolific writing spell, as well as, again, his most intimate interaction with a revolutionary decolonial movement in the face of colonialism, genocidal colonialism. So can you talk a little bit leading up basically from the moment that he decides, OK, time to resign. I'm going to declare my allegiance to the Algerian cause. What is his role then in the movement? Again, I think that this is the part that the listeners probably know the most about. But, you know, we can get into the weeds here a little bit. What was his role within the movement then? And then also, what was it like for him to be trying to conduct analysis and writing at the same time as he was undertaking some of the roles that he was taking within the FLN movement, the liberation movement, and the kind of almost diplomatic role that he was taking within the movement?

Lou Turner: Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of Fanon's work. is the middle book that people don't write much about, A Dying Colonialism. It was published in 1959. And the assignment, let's put it like that, since that's the term of art these days, the assignment that he took was, as he says, and he uses this expression over and over again in A Dying Colonialism, is the new reality of the nation. The assignment was to show, to demonstrate the creation of a new nation arising out of the dissolution of the old colonial society. So the first chapter is Algeria Unveiled. about the Algerian women in the revolution and the change in gender relations in Algeria. And by the way, Abeni was very significant in that, in that there was this fascinating... I heard, by the way, that Raoul Peck is making a film on Fanon, by the way. So we'll see what happens with that. But Dying in Algeria Unveiled was to show the changing relations, gender relations. I would say probably more than half of the book is on gender, because the next chapter is on the family. Then there's the chapter on medicine or the radio, medicine, and then what I call the minority question. That is, the French who are sympathetic to the Algerian cause and whatnot. He writes about that as well. But the assignment is to show not only to the Algerians, but to the various factions within the FLN, what the revolution is producing. It isn't just what you're against, it's what you're for, what you're constructing. And that's the dialectic of revolution. It isn't just trashing, getting rid of something, but in the process of getting rid of an exploitative society, you're creating something new. And so that, I think, is what the assignment was, that he felt... that the FLN needed to understand, not only the Algerians, broadly speaking, that this is what they're creating, these new relations that were developing. You even see it in Battle of Algiers, the film. You see that. By the way, there's a film, presumably, it says the Algerian government said he produced it. It might not be if he produced it, but he was definitely an advisor for it. They could be a producer of it on Algerian children who are refugees, who were his patients. Um, Forget the guy's name. He has a website, a scalar website. I always forget. Mirzoff. Mirzoff is the guy, is the Fanon scholar's name. He writes this, did this, create this website, this platform on Algeria. And he does this, and he reproduces this documentary about, about Algerian refugee children who had been Fanon's patients. And it's fascinating because I don't know if you guys are familiar with Ariel Dorfman. He did work around Central America with children and the drawings that they made of American planes dropping stuff. The same thing. And this is like in the 1960s. It's a very interesting documentary that was made. And so you have this thing about children. You have children in Wretched of the Earth. One of the clinical papers at the end about torture is of children who are victims of torture as well. So all of these social relations are being... rethought, redeveloped in the process of the Algerian revolution. And Fanon you know, as we would say today, platforms that in dying colonialism. You see it, these relations, the relations between fathers and sons changes, the relations between fathers and daughters changes, the relationship between man and wife, you know, husband and wife changes under the impact of it. And, you know, all this comes out of you know, Fanon's kind of sociotherapeutic framework of looking at the social relations. It was only in reading Fanon's brother's memoir that I found out, and this doesn't appear in any of the biographies, by the way. It's interesting. It took the brother to do it. Fanon also had a degree in sociology. Who knew? And there was an important anthropologist at the University of Lyon that Fanon also dedicated his dissertation to that was very influential in Fanon's thinking about society in general and colonial society in particular. So there's a lot of anthropology, social anthropology in Fanon's work as well. The guy's name is Leroy Gorham. Gorham was an anthropologist who Fanon was a professor of anthropology that Fanon took his classes along with Merleau-Ponty. Everybody knows that Fanon took Merleau-Ponty's class. But this other guy, people don't know. And it was, I think, even more influential in Fanon's work in North Africa, just like Merleau-Ponty was influential in Fanon's work in France.

Adnan Hussain: Fascinating. You know, in addition to the production, as you're saying, of the changed society and a vision towards what the FLN as a decolonized nation should be building. He was also writing kind of short pieces that had to do, you know, with kind of contemporary events and global affairs. And I've always been fascinated by that collection towards the African Revolution. It's a grab bag of a bunch of things like some of those early essays on, you know, the North African revolution. problem or the North African question on immigrants and so on, but also a lot of pieces. I'm sure by no means all the pieces, but at least quite a few pieces from the FLN's kind of journal or organ, you know, al-Mujahid, the fighter, you know. And I'm wondering during that period of How would you characterize his work and what he was doing and what the purpose of these pieces were that really talk about not just what's happening in Algeria, though sometimes they are related to the fight for freedom and comment on French-Algerian kind of relations, but very concerned and interested with what's happening in West Africa and these attempts to create the new kind of post-colonial independent, kind of almost like the French version of the British Commonwealth, you know, some way to give people some form of political independence, but then maintain them in a subordinate relationship to France and to introduce this you know, kind of currency. And he has some writings about that. He's interested in what's going on in other places in the world as well. What was this kind of global orientation and how do you see that informing and influencing both the project of the FLN as a decolonizing national liberation movement, but also this broader vision of like, you know, you know, that maybe made space for somebody like Fanon in this kind of world, where it's not like a narrowly Algerian project. It's like a global project.

Lou Turner: Fanon had two assignments for Al Mujahid. Number one, to deal with French liberal and left circles in getting support for the Algerian revolution. I mean, you know, émigré... writers like Richard Wright later on James Baldwin comes later who were living in France at the time or writers from other countries that are living in France or French themselves it is against the law to express any kind of political support for the Algerian revolution so they were constrained by that yet there were intellectual groups that were engaged in In fact, one of the reasons that Fanon made the choice to go to Algeria had to do with his editor, Black Skin, White Mask. It was for, I forget the name of the publisher, but it was tied to Esprit, which is a left Catholic journal. And his name, John... in something, I forget his name, but he was his editor for Black Skin, White Masks, but he was also one of these left intellectuals in France that kind of worked in an underground and were getting, were developing support for the Algerian revolution. So one assignment that Fanon had with of Mujahid was to interact and write, critique, and gain the support of left intellectuals in France. The other assignment was as he became the ambassador for the FLN in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another essay I wrote a few years back was on Fanon and Pan-Africanism and all the conferences that he spoke at in sub-Saharan Africa, of which there were a number of them. By the way, we just found, or someone just found, a speech that hadn't been published before. I can send you the link. Fanon, that he had given in Ghana to WEI, the World Assembly of Youth, He spoke at a number of youth conferences. There's an American emigre woman, I forget her name, she wrote a book.

Adnan Hussain: Elaine Muhtafi. Yeah, that's it. I interviewed her about that. And she mentioned the Congress and meetings, dancing with Fennel, in fact. And that's the occasion when he gave that. I didn't realize that that speech, however, had never been published. That's quite interesting. Yeah.

Lou Turner: Yeah, a friend of mine sent it to me, the link for it. But the thing that I was going to say about her, about Elaine's book, was the description she has is very eerie. And she does it very well. She describes running into Fanon at night with a group of youth at this conference. And she tells the story of it. And she says one of them, and she gives the name of the youth, was this Congolese youth who was the head of the Congolese youth organization that was associated with Lumumba. And that he would be killed with Lumumba a few months later. I mean, it was like really bizarre. weird and scary. Just, you know, everybody knows about the assassination. And one of the last, the last piece in Toward the African Revolution that you, that you reference is, could we have done otherwise? And it was about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the role that African leaders played, beginning with thinking that the United Nations was something other than what Lenin called it, a thief's kitchen for imperialists. And so the African leaders got played, whatever. And so Fanon's article is, could we have done... Or could we do otherwise than being played by these multinational institutions? And so that was the last piece in Toward the African Revolution. But yeah, there's this whole thing about Fanon and these Pan-African conferences, his debates. both on the down low and out front, with Nkrumah on violence versus nonviolence. Nkrumah was for, be sure, I mean, Nkrumah was for civil disobedience and nonviolence. But there was this debate between him him and Fanon, essentially, at a conference that Nkrumah had organized in Ghana. And Fanon gives this talk about why we use violence and stuff like that. And so there's that. I mean, it was that debate was going on in sub-Saharan Africa. But he writes on that as well.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, he was a very crucial figure because he had that role, as you're saying, of being the representative for the FLN to the rest of Africa. So he took a deep interest in revolutionary possibilities and events taking place across Africa.

Lou Turner: And by the way, just one other thing. When you read his, like, Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 2, Spontaneity, Strength, and Weaknesses, he does this very interesting thing that I think is often missed. It's not a chapter that people spend much time about. That is, he compares and contrasts proletarian politics in a developed capitalist country like... France and what that represents to what radical politics in a colony would be. And he says you can't take that framework that Radicals understand in France, a capitalist country, and then superimpose that on a society like Algeria. Things play out very differently. So he's global in that sense as well. I mean, colonialism makes him global in that way because... He's doing these comparisons and contrasts that help to, I think, try to clarify what politics and ideology meant. One last point. In Troy, the African Revolution, one of my favorite chapters is his logbook. from a reconnaissance mission through Mali. Now I write a whole piece on Fanon's relationship to the FLN, mostly because the biographies get a lot of it wrong. But why he was on that reconnaissance trip through Mali to open a southern front through Mali into Algeria to get military supplies into Algeria. It has to do with Ebene Ramdani, who had been assassinated, whatnot. But Ebene and Fanon believed that the revolution had to come from the inside, from inside Algerian society and whatnot, and not from the outside. And because by now, the FL land, the AL land, they've been out of the game. I mean, the French erect these electrified fences in the Moroccan and Tunisian border. They can't get in. So the army is out, you know, out of play. But that doesn't stop Abaini and Fanon because they always believed that it was the social, not the military, that would determine the revolution and that that came from within the the revolution within Algeria. So he's trying to get arms through the southern border of Algeria into Algeria. In fact, there was one talk of creating an all-African military force at one time to do it. And in his logbook said he has some of the most important reflections on not just Algeria, but on the African revolutions. And the one that gets me is that he says, the deeper I go into the political circles of the revolution of the anti-colonial movement in africa he says no he says this this continent will soon be independent but the the the deeper i go into the political circles the the more i'm concerned not about whether we will win or not but the lack of ideology in these circles. And I think this idea of what he's doing with dying colonialism to actually show what the revolution is about, to actually talk about the reconstruction of a new society. And he calls for it in one of those articles, a couple of those articles toward the African Revolution, that they want a social democratic republic. Not everybody in the FLN was fighting for that.

Henry Huckamacki: Mm-hmm.

Lou Turner: So those contradictions got played out, by the way, as we know, what was it, in the 1980s or whatnot, with the war or whatnot. And to kind of end, not quite end, but to end the story of the Fanon line, his wife commits suicide. Josie throws herself, she was living in Algiers, throws herself out of a window because she says France would be so sad. to see what Algeria had kind of resorted to. And by the way, you know, he's dying of leukemia. I write about that he goes to Rome in the summer of 1961 to meet with Sartre, since you guys seem to be fans of Sartre. I'm playing.

Adnan Hussain: We're fans of critiquing the fact that Sartre seems to have an undue influence on the interpretation of Ferenc.

Lou Turner: We'll get there. But he goes to meet Sartre in Rome in the summer of 1961. He's dying of leukemia. That is, Fanon is. Sartre is under the weather himself. And it's in Simone de Beauvoir's memoir that we get a description of the meeting. And Fanon comes to speak to Sartre. I think it's to write the preface to Wretched of the Earth. And Fanon wants to talk with Sartre into the night. And de Beauvoir is annoyed that Fanon won't stop talking to Sartre. And Fanon, he says, well, Sartre, he says that Jean-Paul has to go to bed. He's not ill and whatnot. And Fanon says, I would give my life to speak with Sartre all night long. She says, but that's how he Sartre writes what Sartre, you know, regardless, what Sartre scholars say is the most revolutionary thing Sartre ever wrote was the preface. I mean, we can critique it. I do. But it is in terms of Sartre's studies. Now, some have argued, including my friend Robert Bernasconi, who you should talk to. He's written a lot about Fanon. He's at Penn State. Bernard Stoney is arguing that Fanon was very much influenced by Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason in writing Wretched of Europe. So there's that whole wing. It's getting some traction a little bit. There's also Fanon and Foucault. Interestingly, Fanon gives these lectures at the University of Tunis on madness and society. Three years later... Foucault comes to teach at the University of Tunis. And if you read Fanon's lectures and read Foucault, there's some people who are doing some work on the whole... Would this be the first case of a colonial intellectual appropriating the work of the indigenous and the resistant? Exactly right. That's right. So... Like I said, there's a lot to Fanon. This is very interesting as well. I have a number of things on my to-do list of areas of Fanon's work I want to

Adnan Hussain: Well, I mean, there's still so much. It's so fascinating because one thing that it seems that your work and approach is doing and continuing scholarship that others are doing on the biography is that it's revealing new ways and new levels or points of emphasis to really see The world in which he lived in and the ideological kind of matrix, you know, of all these intellectuals and how they're discussing and thinking about these issues and their interrelations with one another, but also to bring greater kind of context and interpretive critique to his works and the way many people read them. before they really knew that much maybe about his life or some of his other minor kind of technical writings or his papers and so on. And so this is maybe a good time to try and talk a little bit more about his work. And we've had occasion to mention quite a few of them. The two that typically have received the most kind of attention and interpretation and kind of from somewhat different communities of emphasis. And so I'm interested in how you would think these get brought together is, of course, black skin, white masks, blackness. everybody who works on, you know, kind of modern race and race theory from a kind of psychoanalytic and, you know, kind of working with Du Bois, double consciousness and so on. They have all this productive stuff to do with Fanon's analysis of race and racism and how that operates. And then on the other hand, Wretched of the Earth, and that's for the decolonizers, the anti-colonial kind of community that is looking at, you know, kind of continuing colonialism or other occasions of colonialism. They find a theoretical kind of analysis for how colonialism works. And I think and wonder how you think. I think they actually go together much more. They're part of a more integrated because all colonialism is racial. You know, like there's no way you separate. Oh, well, this is a phenomenon of racism. That's a phenomenon of colonialism as if they're separate things. They go really hand in hand. And so I'm wondering if, like, maybe you have an approach for how to think through these two major works that people often spend a lot of time, but often treat them as very separate, as different kinds of questions or different kinds of issues. Then maybe we might talk, come back to looking at some of the more, you know, the ignored works, like, you know, that haven't been as popular. thoroughly studied like towards the African Revolution or the, you know, dying colonialism and so on. But those two big ones, how do you kind of think about their interrelationship for Fanon? Partly because one is sort of his first major work and the other one is at the end of his life. So it almost seems like they're part of two different worlds of his experience and concern and attention. But, you know, how do you think of these in the context of That biographical unity, you know, that this is the same person and he may have thought different things, but he's been concerned with similar kinds of problems and questions from a psychoanalytic point of view. What's your sort of comment on that?

Lou Turner: A kind of loose framework to think about it. I agree with you that they definitely are connected. Not everybody views it that way. But one kind of loose framework to think about it dialectically is continuity or their continuity, their discontinuity. and what is new. The continuity, one of the continuities I'll take, I use as an example, I think there are many between the two, is the place of the, quote, American Negro in both works. It's fascinating. Black people and African Americans. American Negro is the term used back then. In his treatment of what he calls the Negro and recognition, in Black Skin, White Mask, it has two sections to it. One is on the Negro and Adler analytical psychology. The second one is on the Negro and Hegel. It's the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I'm a Hegel scholar, so I spend a lot of time. In fact, I wrote the first piece on the difference between Fanon and Hegel on the master-slave dialectic. And Fanon, out of it, has a critical view of the antilleum. in relationship to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. I won't rehearse the whole analysis and whatnot. But he has, he says, both in the text and in a footnote, Now, of course, I'm talking about the Antillean Negro because in America, in the United States, the American Negro is cast in a different play. There it is again, the drama. It's cast in a different play. He battles and he is battled. He fights and he is fought back. And it's a different thing. And he singles out the difference between between African-Americans and other people of color in colonial situations. That's black skin, white mass. Then you get to wretched of the earth. Two things to make. After writing Dying Colonialism and publishing it in 1959, there was some indication that he was going to write a second book on Algeria. Dying Colonialism is on Algeria, that he was going to write a second book on Algeria. He doesn't do that. He writes Wretched of the Earth, a more generalized book on anti-colonial struggles, not another book on Algeria. And Algeria still plays a role in Wretched of the Earth, but he doesn't write another book on Algeria. So there's a difference. Black Skin, White Masks is before the revolution, before it becomes involved. Clearly, Wretched of the Earth is his summation of his experience in the revolution. In chapter one, concerning violence and wretched of the earth, again, he brings up the quote, American Negro. And this is fascinating. I've read this for years, passed me by until I finally, until you drill down. He talks about, he says, yes, in America, Negroes are starting gun clubs, right? And I had to look it up to figure out the dates.

Adnan Hussain: Robert Williams.

Lou Turner: Robert Williams. And there was a news conference in North Carolina, and it had made the papers, and he had to have seen it.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Lou Turner: So again, he says, so to speak, it's the more generalized view of the nature of decolonization and Black revolutionary struggle than just another piece on Algeria. But it's fascinating how many times you see Fanon's work come in to the discourse in America. Again, Bobby Seale tells the story that in 1966, the year that he and Huey Newton started the Black Panther Party, that he said, that Bobby says that he read Breath of the Air six times before he introduced it to Huey. I don't know, but anyway, so that became a significant part. I wrote a piece on the various views by people on Fanon. James Foreman was very important. James Foreman was writing a biography of Fanon. And apparently, the manuscript is in the Library of Congress where his papers are. Foreman actually made a trip to Martinique to interview family and friends that knew Fanon. That's how serious he was about writing it and whatnot. But the manuscript, apparently, which I've never looked at, I found out was in the Library of Congress. And he gave talks on... on Fanone as well. Kathleen Cleaver has written about the significance of Fanone and the Black Panther Party. Richard Wright's relationship to Fanone. Fanone writes a letter to Richard Wright during the time of Black Skin, White Mask saying that he, Fanone, is writing a book about Richard Wright's work we don't know where the manuscript is. Wright's daughter, Julia, who's still alive after the mother passed away, Wright's papers are at the Beinecke Library in Yale, at Yale University. It might be in there. So there was a lot of connections to Fanon. There's others that I can mention as well. So there's this whole thing about Fanon. And then the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. And Fanon, South Africa is very significant. in terms of his thinking about colonialism. It appears in both Black Skin, White Mask, and Wretched of the Earth, the role of apartheid in South Africa. And, you know, so there's that as well. But there's so much to Fanon's work that... I still want to engage. And I think it just hasn't been touched by so many, despite there being this global industry of Fanon study. Fanon's relationship to the psychologist Jaspers is nobody's really unpacked it. And it was very influential when you read black skin studies. white mass. Sartre's anti-Semite and Jew was very influential in Fanon and looking at the comparison, comparing anti-Semitism to anti-Black racism, for instance. So there's so many so many elements to Fanon's work that there's so much still to be, to reference. But I'm very interested in what young people who are first coming to Fanon are finding in him. And it was very invigorating having this reading group a month ago here on campus with young intellectuals from Nigeria and the United States and other countries discovering Fanon for the first time.

Henry Huckamacki: So I just wanted to say that it's really interesting because even in that last answer that you had, which is directly related to what I wanted to say with my next question, which I'll ask anyway, is that many of Fanon's works, particularly Wretched of the Earth, really exploded onto the scene as soon as they were written. They were utilized extensively. in the area that they were being written they were distributed widely across the world but you also mentioned that in some contexts fanon was kind of late to the scene and i don't mean that fanon himself was but that his works weren't utilized by the movements that you would expect to be utilizing fanon's works very quickly they came in decades later in some cases meanwhile we also have As you said, even today, we have young people who are discovering Fanon for the first time. And because of these different locations, these different moments of time, these different political realities on the ground in whatever context Fanon is being discovered in, whether that was Algeria or the Black Panthers in the 1960s to students at University of Illinois Urbane today, These contexts are different. And because of these different contexts, we end up with many different legacies from Fanon. We also have many different scholars from different political tendencies who are analyzing Fanon. So this is to begin to move us into the legacy section. But I'm wondering if we can begin by kind of digging a little bit deeper into the last part that you were talking about in that. Fanon was being used right away in some context, but Fanon was coming in to some of these political scenes much later than we would possibly expect in other contexts. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lou Turner: Yeah. Lewis Gordon edited a book that's where my Fanon and Hegel piece appears. He and his co-editors wrote a preface about the various Fanon waves. It's the way that they contextualize Fanon's influence. He calls them waves. I'm not always happy with that formulation, but it's a way, at least provisionally, to think about it. With a whole wave of post-modernism and post-colonial studies, there was a new awakening to Fanon. In fact, there was a new translation of his works by the last name of the translators, Phil Cox. Both Black Skin, White Masks, and Wretched of the Earth were retranslated from the original translation by Charles Markman of Black Skin, White Masks, and Francis Carrington, I think, of Wretched of the Earth. Carrington, by the way, there's a whole book on translating Fanon. Francis Farrington. There's a whole book that I have around here somewhere on translating Fanon into various languages. But Francis Farrington, Constance Farrington, I keep messing up her name, Constance Farrington, was actually an Irish nationalist activist. was living in France at the time and wanted to make some money. She had to make some money to live. And she may have even been in the midst of learning French and whatnot, or she already had some French under her belt, but that's how she came. But her politics was Irish... anti-imperialist against British colonialism and so there's that kind of connection but with the new post-modernist post-colonial wave Fanon gets reimagined by a whole set of thinkers who are influenced by post-structuralism and it intersects with post-colonial studies So there was that period after Fanon had pretty much died out. But the post-structuralism, post-colonial thing rediscovers Fanon. I would say that the 2000s represents a new awakening for of reawakening of Fanon that is more political and certainly comes to a head with the whole Black Lives Matter, George Floyd moment. In fact, that statement, I can't breathe, George Floyd and Fanon, we don't revolt for any particular culture, but simply because we cannot read, is could show you how deep you can drill down in this stuff. Fanon was influenced by a Austrian psychologist by the name of Brewer. Brewer was a physician, wasn't even a psychologist. Brewer was the mentor to Freud. And it's actually Brewer who developed... the talking cure, not Freud. They wrote, they co-wrote a monograph on one of Brewer's patients. Brewer was a physician, not a psychologist, but he got into psychology because his patient kept coming to him. Anna is her pseudonym, talking about some issues she had, dreams and whatnot. And he got, and Freud is his, so to speak, his intern working with him. And this is how, but Brewer was, If you look it up, there's something called the Herring-Brewer reflex. This gets really weird. The Herring-Brewer-Typhon reflex. The Herring-Brewer reflex, remember Brewer is a physician and is a physiologist, is the reflex that our lungs make so that they don't keep expanding when we take a breath in. It's kind of an involuntary reflex that these guys discover. But it's about breathing. And we find out from Fanon's, actually Macy's biography, but more importantly, the Alienation and Freedom book, where we have Fanon's clinical papers, that Fanon was very much into physiology and neurology. Both his dissertation advisor, Leon, was a neurologist and was influenced in his ideas. And so it's not unusual that Fanon was so well-versed, both as a surgeon and a psychiatrist, who was influenced by Brewer, with the physiology of breathing. And it appears later on in Dying Colonialism, where he talks about women again, and he talks about what he calls combat breathing. that it creates in the colonized a different kind of breathing, this breathing that colonialism creates a reflex in them that creates this, what he calls this combat breathing. So this whole thing about breathing goes throughout from black skin, white mass to dying colonialism. And I found it doing this reading group again, I'm breathing again in wretched of the earth. So, So even at the physiological level, Fanon is looking at the effects, the impact of colonialism on the physical being of the trauma that inflicts on the physical being of the colonized. So it isn't just the psychological, it's also the physiological, and that connects you know him uh allows him to connect the environment to the uh the lived experience of of people and so when in the chapter one on violence he talks about its impact in very physical terms the tensity of muscles uh that it creates the physicality of the dreams the The physicality of the dreams, the whole thing. And so that's a whole new area that I've been looking at. And I think hopefully will be something that this new generation might be interested in as well. There's a lot of discussion about mental health, trauma. mindfulness, whatever, in this current era. But Fanon's work continues to speak to us in new ways. So it makes him contemporary, continues to make him contemporary.

Adnan Hussain: Absolutely. And it reminds me that there's been a lot of recent interest, not only because of the 100th anniversary, but I would say The new biography of Adam Schatz came out right at a point where the start of the post-October 7th genocide in Gaza, you know, happened. And so a lot of people were rediscovering Fanon. You know, while thinking about, you know, settler colonialism, resistance, the decolonizing anti-colonial struggle, while also having to really encounter a particular approach to managing the legacy of Fanon that we see in that book that mirrored some of the kind of positions on the left. when it came to solidarity with the Palestine struggle. So it became salient yet again, like what's your position on Fanon? I remember somebody writing, oh, you should, people should be reading more Marx and less Fanon. And I retweeted back like this is absolutely the time where people need to be reading Fanon. And they in fact are for a good reason, because You know, it fits into this anti-colonial sort of struggle. So I was wondering what you think about, you know, this component of the legacy. And it gets back to a question you had raised in your remarks earlier about whether, you know, non-revolutionary scholars or writers or biographers can really... I mean, obviously they can write about, but can they successfully write about and really understand and re-communicate what was so important, vibrant, and radically transformative writing? about a revolutionary's kind of writings or thought like somebody like Fanon, if they themselves don't necessarily, or maybe they want to say that, you know, maybe what they end up doing is they make somebody like Fanon into a really deeply insightful, but, you know, not radical person. Thinker, you know, and so I'm wondering about that kind of question. And maybe you have some remarks as well about that biography that had a big impact, but I think in some ways failed the moment it came out at a moment that it quickly became seen as totally obsolete. I mean, there was an attempt to like. you know, advance it further given the context. But I think it very quickly seemed dispensable. Like this is a much touted new biography, but the vision of Fanon that it projected didn't meet the moment. Like it was easily dismissed as like, okay, this clearly doesn't get the radical Fanon that is actually what we need right now in this moment.

Henry Huckamacki: And just to add on to what Adnan was asking here, so not only can these non-revolutionary thinkers get Fanon in the radical actuality of someone like Fanon, but also is it possible for them to even correctly communicate the political project? that revolutionaries like Fanon were driving towards. So, you know, there's almost like this two way... There's two ways that we have to look at it. Can they understand the person and the work of the person? But can they also communicate effectively the political project and communicate the political project in a way that it's relevant in the current era? I think that that's also a very germane point because... You know, it's one thing to understand the words on a page. It's another thing to understand what that person is telling us to do with them.

Lou Turner: I think, you know, when we were collecting pieces for our anthology on phononium practices, we actually had reached out and gotten a response from a psychotherapist who worked in, a Palestinian psychotherapist that worked in Gaza. But for her having, like all of us, so many things on our plates, she really wanted to do it, but was unable to do it. And it's one of those missed moments. What can I say? When we do a new edition, I'm going to re-engage her again. We also... Miss Hussein Bulhan, who I think you guys were trying to get. And, you know, he's head of the Frantz Fanon University in Somaliland.

Adnan Hussain: So there's that.

Lou Turner: Yeah, we quote this piece, an editorial by the managing editor, What's that British medical journal?

Henry Huckamacki: The Lancet.

Lou Turner: Lancet. Sorry, I think I had just a mind freeze. When we were putting together the collection, the managing editor, totally unsolicited and came out of nowhere to us, wrote an editorial for The Lancet rethinking the origins of World Health, Global Health. And he says the real progenitor, the origin of world health as a movement is Frantz Fanon. In fact, he was arguing against the notion that the progenitor the historical periodization of world health originating, doesn't deny that it was just an important moment with the whole AIDS epidemic as being one of the origins of world health. But he said, you have to go back further to Fanon. He says, if we define it in terms of a global movement, that is connected to a global transformation based on health, again, looking at Fanon in terms of health, then we'd have to say that Frantz Fanon is the origin of global health, whether it is the kind of stuff that The Lancet covers with disasters and responding to disasters of various kinds or epidemics, pandemics or whatnot. He says that really we have to go back to Frantz Fanon as the originator of global health. So even in that rarefied area of health and healthcare and responses to global disasters and whatnot. People in various fields recognize the significance of Fanon. And if you think about it back at the time when Wretched of the Earth first hit in the 1960s, the same kind of folks at the New York Review of Books and others that was the London Review of Books, which Adam Schatz worked for, their attack on Fanon was pretty relentless. Because again, they get caught up in the whole chapter on on violence and whatnot. Hannah Rents, famous, you know, denunciation of Fanon. But so, I mean, I see people like Schatz as within, not necessarily, well, I see him within that tradition, but somewhat, you know, revisionist view of it. Because again, people from the intelligentsia from that body of, uh, of work and thinking, um, had this kind of, you know, fascination with the figure of Fanon, but back then in the end were resistant to it or romanticized it. Um, kind of in the way in which intellectuals and, um, uh, artists like, you know, Leonard Bernstein were, you know, we have dinners with the black Panthers or something like that. I mean, so it's, it's kind of within that kind of liberal intelligentsia, um, that, uh, I see Schatz work. Although again, he may, you know, he has the advantage of, uh, you know, uh, a generation or more of work on Fanon that would inform it. But I don't know that he gets to what Adnan was talking about in terms of the... And Henry's talking about the political project, the radical project of Fanon. I think there is an approach to use the... to use an Adlerian term, there's an approach avoidance reflex at work with intellectuals like that. They approach it, but then they find ways of marginalizing the actual project that Fanon represents. So we come back to the question, can non-revolutionaries write about revolutionary figures authentically, write about revolutionary figures like Fanon. By the way, authenticity was a major trope in Black Skin, White Mask about living authentically. And that's one of the core principles in Fanon's psychology. Go to Adnan's point about the connection between black skin, white mask and wretched of the earth is living authentically. And obviously, colonialism doesn't allow you to do it. And revolution does. I make a connection, by the way, in a follow up to Fanon and Hegel and the master slave dialectic. Hegel has two concepts of labor. One is the labor in the master-slave dialectic. And then the other one is what he calls work. It's the difference between labor and work. Later on in the phenomenology, he talks about work. And Fanon uses the term work in Wretched of the Earth. And he says the work of the militant is to make revolution happen. More importantly, to make a new society. So it's labor, which is, you know, under colonialism or as a proletarian, under capital. And there's labor, and then there's work. And there's this distinction that Fanon has in his thinking. So black skin, white mask is before the revolution. So it's labor. But rest of the earth is in the revolution and it becomes work. He says the militant is a man who works.

Henry Huckamacki: So, Lou, you've been extremely generous with your time. We've been here for already about two hours in the recording. Plus, we chatted before the recording started. And I know that before we started recording, we had already asked you if you'd be willing to come back on for another conversation, kind of in a roundtable format. format with a few other people and we certainly still want you to come back for that roundtable format discussion at some point on this final question that we were talking about on whether non-revolutionaries can properly think about understand and convey revolutionaries to other people but I first want to thank you for the time that you've given us here today but as a closing question just very briefly For listeners who, you know, we've been talking about Fanon, like I said, since I think the first episode of this show, which was about five years ago and over 300 episodes. So we've had a lot of mentions of Fanon. And surely a lot of our listeners have already read their Fanon. But I'm hoping that this episode will serve something as an impetus for those who haven't actually found the time yet to sit down with some of Fanon's works and actually read them. So for those listeners who, again, we're encouraging them, you know, we know everybody's busy. We have a lot of things to do. But when you find time and you are able to sit down with Fanon, Lou, what would your biggest tip or two be for people who are coming and reading Fanon for the first time today? Do you have any suggestions for these people in how to digest and i mean i don't mean that his material is hard to read it's very engaging but in terms of how to get the most out of reading fanon what would your suggestions be that's a major project in itself henry but it's also a simple one read black skin white mask first

Lou Turner: and read the work in the order that he wrote it. I say it for this reason. You asked me at the beginning, if we can go full circle, about how I began. And Fanone says this, and I haven't unpacked it fully. I want to write a piece on this. I want to have... It takes a lot of work. So far as I know, nobody has. Fanone wrote Black Skin, White Mask as... for the reader to have a therapeutic experience. And he actually says something similar to that. And it was certainly therapeutic for a young Black man in the 1960s to do it. Now, my context was the social movements, and there was that. And everyone has their own historical context in which they read But it was, it allowed me, it compelled me to unpack a lot of things. It is a therapy session, to put it quietly. And it's the same thing for somebody who's non-Black. And I've had You know, black colleagues and friends say the same thing. Students say, you know, white colleagues, students say the same thing. And I remember speaking at a friend's class in Staten Island way back in the day. I think it was in the 80s or something. And it was an undergraduate class. And a brave student, Dr. Fanone, a brave white student came up in the discussion and says, you know, because they're supposed to give their impressions. So he says, why is Fanone so angry? And I took the question seriously in terms that clearly something that this student had had an experience with. in reading Fanon. And that's the way he articulated it. And because I couldn't come up with something, I wasn't trying to be clever. I really was trying to take his question seriously. But the only thing I could come up with is that I believe Fanon was confident that in the future, somebody like me, who was a little less angry, would come along to explain it to people. I mean, I, it, and, and it was, I think this is something that this kid had obviously mulled around. He had this class. He's in this class. He has to read this book, black skin, white bath and whatnot. And it clearly, he had an experience with it. And my experience at that age was, you know, something different. Uh, I certainly saw the anger in Fanon reading it at the, you know, the young age. Um, But we both had an experience. And I think Fanon's work engages you like that. There's one essay a friend of mine, a colleague of mine here a couple weeks ago reminded me of because the guy used to teach her who wrote the essay. It was on Fanon's rhetoric. And it's the only one I've come across about Fanon's rhetoric. One thing to understand about Fanon's writing, and this gets to all of this, is kind of the background. People don't know. I think Macy may mention this. Fanon's work is, all of his work is spoken word. He didn't write it. He spoke it and somebody else wrote it down. Think about that. I mean, really think about that. I mean, the immediacy. The idea and the communication of the idea is something else. It's not mediated by the technology of writing or typing or whatnot. It's all spoken word. You're getting something almost immediately from somebody. Clearly he's thought about this stuff for a long time, but yeah, his work was spoken.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. Wonderful things to keep in mind for first-time readers of Fanon, as well as those of us returning to Fanon time and time again. Again, listeners, our guest was Professor Lou Turner, clinical professor in urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Lou, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show. Is there anywhere that you would like to direct the listeners to if they want to find more of your work?

Lou Turner: Well, you can Google me. I'm now in the middle of, after finally doing everybody else's work or a thousand projects, I'm finally putting my own work up on a platform called Ideals. So I'm in the midst of doing that. But for now, you can, I mean, a lot of, I've written a lot on Fanon, a lot on other things, but you can Google me.

Henry Huckamacki: Great. And again, I'm going to hold you to coming back on the show again for that roundtable discussion. Adnan, it was great seeing you again. Can you let the listeners know how they can find you and your other excellent show?

Adnan Hussain: Sure. But first, I just want to say, Lou, I mean, you are a treasure and a treasure trove of knowledge. So pleased to have had this chance to learn more about Fanon from you. And where you ended is almost like a whole new starting place in my mind. I'm just trying to think about all the implications of it being... spoken that is just so amazing so i definitely concur with henry we have to have you back on uh sometime soon uh so a pleasure thank you so much um listeners you can find out about uh Well, you can follow me on Twitter, x at Adnan A. Hussain, H-U-S-A-I-N. And of course, you should, if you're a guerrilla history person, then you should be an Adnan Hussain show person. So subscribe to that podcast. It's an audio podcast. But also, if you like to watch YouTube videos, all my interviews, discussions, panels, and live streams end up there on YouTube as well. So it's at Adnan Hussain show. Do check it out.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. Highly recommend that. As for me, listeners, I am not really on social media these days. I haven't been able to log in in months, but you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995. At some point, I may get back on there in order to keep up with me. You can't really like I'm in a lot of places these days, but I'm not really able to announce it. So, for example, next Saturday at the time of recording, I'm speaking at a conference about Russia and the anti-imperialist world, but I have no way of communicating that with people, and by the time this episode comes out, that'll be long gone. So, listeners, to keep up with me, I don't know, ask Adnan what I'm up to or something like that. But you can follow Guerrilla History on all of the social media platforms as well, on Twitter at guerrilla underscore pod, Instagram guerrilla underscore history, guerrillahistory.substack.com for the email newsletter. But most importantly, if you... appreciate the content that we're able to produce and put out every week, more or less, and would like to help support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And of course, we appreciate that. And since I'm really not on social media at all these days, it would be also greatly appreciated if you could share our episodes on social media. You know, a little bit of promotion goes a long way as well. So with that being said, listeners, and until next time, solidarity.