Frantz Fanon, My Brother

Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary

Translated by Daniel Nethery - Joby Fanon

The short, but remarkable, life of Frantz Fanon has attracted several biographers, all of whom have relied on Fanon’s older brother, Joby, for information on Fanon’s early life. Dissatisfied with these portrayals, Joby decided to tell the story of his brother in his own words with a richness of detail not found in any other work. Translated into English by Daniel Nethery, this is an intimate, passionate, and very human account of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Frantz Fanon stands as one of the most uncompromising critics of racism and colonialism. His experience growing up as French colonial subject taught him to be fearless in the defense of his ideals. At the age of seventeen he left his home island of Martinique to fight in Europe against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied medicine and wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. He practiced as a psychiatrist in Algeria and put his medical skills and literary talent in the service of the struggle for Algerian independence and African liberation. He died in 1961, one week after the publication of his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. He was thirty-six years old. « less more »

Lexington Books

Pages: 156 • Trim: 6 1/2 x 9 1/4

978-0-7391-8048-8 • Hardback • July 2014 • $86.00 • (£60.00)

978-0-7391-8049-5 • eBook • July 2014 • $81.50 • (£54.95)

Series: Critical Africana Studies

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Social Science / World / Africa

Frantz Fanon, My Brother

Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The short, but remarkable, life of Frantz Fanon has attracted several biographers, all of whom have relied on Fanon’s older brother, Joby, for information on Fanon’s early life. Dissatisfied with these portrayals, Joby decided to tell the story of his brother in his own words with a richness of detail not found in any other work. Translated into English by Daniel Nethery, this is an intimate, passionate, and very human account of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Frantz Fanon stands as one of the most uncompromising critics of racism and colonialism. His experience growing up as French colonial subject taught him to be fearless in the defense of his ideals. At the age of seventeen he left his home island of Martinique to fight in Europe against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied medicine and wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. He practiced as a psychiatrist in Algeria and put his medical skills and literary talent in the service of the struggle for Algerian independence and African liberation. He died in 1961, one week after the publication of his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. He was thirty-six years old.

Book Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 156 • Trim: 6 1/2 x 9 1/4

978-0-7391-8048-8 • Hardback • July 2014 • $86.00 • (£60.00)

978-0-7391-8049-5 • eBook • July 2014 • $81.50 • (£54.95)

Series: Critical Africana Studies

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Social Science / World / Africa

Author

Joby Fanon, born in Martinique in 1923, studied law in Paris and worked as a customs officer in Paris, Moroni, and Strasbourg. For his support of a short-lived Martinican independence movement in the early 1960s, he was banned from his home island for over a decade. He later retired to Martinique, where he wrote this biography of his younger brother, Frantz. Joby Fanon died in 2004.

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Our Family
3. Our Youth in Fort-de-France
4. Our Schooling during the War
5. Dissidence
6. The Soldier
7. Frantz and His Family
8. Return to Martinique after the War
9. Studies in France
10. The Death of our Father
11. A Vacation in Nantua
12. The Playwright
13. Black Skin, White Masks
14. The General Practitioner
15. Blida
16. Gabrielle
17. The First Congress of Black Writers
18. The Second Congress
19. Tunis
20. A Telegram
21. Death and Burial
22. Fanon and Martinique
23. Fanon and Humanism

Reviews

Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary is an engaging and personal volume, which brings Fanon alive as a thinker, a humanist, and a man of action and constant movement. Written forty years after Fanon’s death, the emotion that comes through the book is one of deep love. As Fanon’s closest brother, Joby is an essential interlocutor and has been a source for all of Fanon’s biographers, but here he also wants to set the record straight. As well as a portrait of Joby and Frantz Fanon’s family life in Martinique, the biography includes illuminating and important family letters and summaries of Frantz Fanon’s plays. This is a book that everyone interested in Frantz Fanon should have in their library.
— Nigel C. Gibson, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College

Frantz Fanon, My Brother

Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary

Translated by Daniel Nethery - Joby Fanon

Frantz Fanon, My Brother

Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary

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