The Wretched of the Earth Themes

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a critical look at colonialism, the practice of taking political control of another country with the intention of establishing a settlement and exploiting the people economically. Colonialism began in Europe around the 15th century, and it is still practiced today in some parts of the world. Fanon, a French West Indian from Martinique, a French colony located in the eastern Caribbean Sea, had a personal interest…

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is an examination of the psychological effects of colonialism. Fanon was a practicing psychiatrist in France, and later in Algeria during the Algerian War of Independence—a war fought between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front between 1954 and 1962, which resulted in Algeria becoming an independent nation. Fanon was particularly interested in the psychological impact of colonialism on the colonized individual. The colonial situation, Fanon contends…

The Wretched of the Earth follows the struggles of the colonized nation and its move to independence in a process known as decolonization, which, plainly put, is the undoing of colonialism and the oppression that goes along with it. The primary way in which a new nation is built is through the development of national consciousness, a shared national identity that identifies people as collective parts of an independent nation. However, the problem…

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that one of the ways in which colonial forces oppress colonized individuals is through the erasure of black culture. Racist colonial powers claim that colonized countries, especially those on the continent of Africa, are devoid of culture and meaningful artistic expression. The absence of culture is considered the height of barbarism, and colonialism assumes that in the precolonial period, Africa “was akin to a darkness of…