Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“It is a clear call for the West to recognize the dignity of the non-Western man.” —African Forum
Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon was one of the great political analysts of our time, the author of such seminal works of modern revolutionary theory as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He has had a profound impact on civil rights, anti-colonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world.
A Dying Colonialism is Fanon’s incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy those oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression. This is a strong, lucid, and militant book; to read it is to understand why Fanon says that for the colonized, “having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death.”
“[A Dying Colonialism] continues to have for the reader years afterwards the same freshness it had at the time it was written, because Fanon’s main preoccupation was not to document the facts of exploitation, nor the sufferings of the people, nor the brutality of the imperialist oppressor. . . . His main interest has been to go to the essentials: the spirit of struggle, of opposition, of initiative of the Algerian masses; their infinite, multiform, interminable resistance; their daily heroism; their capacity to learn in weeks, in days, in minutes, all that was necessary for the struggle for liberation; their capacity and decision to make all the sacrifices and all the efforts, among which the greatest was not giving one’s life in combat, perhaps, but changing one’s daily life, one’s routines, prejudices, and immemorial customs insofar as these were a hindrance to the revolutionary struggle.” —Adolfo Gilly, from his introduction
“It is a clear call for the West to recognize the dignity of the non-Western man.” —African Forum
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