Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics

Roberto Beneduce is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Turin. He is the founding director of the Frantz Fanon Center in Turin. His recent publications include a collection of Fanon’s psychiatric writings in Italian, Decolonizzare la follia. Scritti sulla psichiatria coloniale (2011), and L'histoire au corps (Embodying History) (2016). In 2016 he edited a special issue of the journal Politique Africaine, "Mobilzer Fanon".Nigel C. Gibson is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Emerson College. He is author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003) and Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2014), and the editor of Rethinking Fanon (1999) and Living Fanon (2011). He is the editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies.

• Foreword Alice Cherki / Introduction / 1. The Thoughts of a Young Psychiatrist on Race, Social Psychiatry, Theories of Madness and ‘the Human Condition’ / 2. The Political Phenomenology of the Body and Black Disalienation / 3. The Ends of Colonial Psychiatry and the Birth of a Critical Ethnopsychiatry / 4. Suspect Bodies: A Phenomenology of Colonial Experience / 5. Further Steps Towards a Critical Ethnopsychiatry: Sociotherapy: Its Strengths and Weaknesses / 6. The Impossibility of Mental Health in a Colonial Society: Fanon Joins the FLN / 7. Psychiatry, Violence, and Revolution: Body and Mind in Context / 8. The Tunis Psychiatric Day Hospital / 9. Bitter Orange: The Consequences of an Anticolonial War / 10. From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders, or the Psychic Life of History / 11. A Note on Translating Frantz Fanon Lisa Damon / Bibliography

At last a conspicuous gap in the literature has been addressed, and brilliantly so: Gibson & Beneduce guide us through Fanon's explicitly psychiatric work in a way which reorients us to Fanon's own radical history and to our own Fanonian historical moment. A path-breaking contribution to thinking the 'psychic life of power'.