Adam Shatz on Frantz Fanon
in conversation with Vinson Cunningham
Thursday, February 22, 6:30 pm
The Skylight Room, the Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10036
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. Fanon was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life―and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Former Leon Levy Fellow Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Commonweal. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. A former White House staffer, he now teaches in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. His debut novel, Great Expectations, will be released on March 26th, 2024, by Hogarth Books.