As both psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon joined the struggle against French colonialism in the 1950s. Today, countless studies explore his work—yet one question persists: is Fanon more relevant now than ever?

In late 1956, Fanon formally enlisted in the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) during Algeria’s war of independence. The gulf between today’s world order and the future he envisioned—intertwined with decolonization—remains vast. He is widely regarded as a founding figure of Third-Worldism (tiers-mondisme).

During the 1960s, revolutionaries—from Che Guevara to the Black Panthers, and nascent solidarity movements in Europe’s capitalist metropoles—were drawn to his 1961 manifesto Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1966). Yet Fanon was not without his detractors: he was branded a nationalist, an irrationalist, even a “black racist” and, oddly, a violinist. Hannah Arendt accused him of thinking in “organic–biological categories” in On Violence (1969), while orthodox Communist parties dismissed him as a spontaneous populist who glorified both rural colonized peoples and the urban “rag-proletariat.” Contemporary debates—particularly in Britain and the United States—have largely moved beyond these reductive labels.

Fanon in postmoderne

Stuart Hall and Homi K. Bhabha—two of the most influential figures in Postcolonial Studies, itself a branch of Cultural Studies—have given us fresh reasons to rediscover Fanon. They draw attention to the postmodern ambivalence in his work, especially the tension between the “free subject” and “foreign determinism” in his theory of selfhood. In doing so, they even read his own life as a story of hybrid identity formation. Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), first published by Éditions du Seuil in 1952, now reads strikingly like a precursor to both postmodern and postcolonial thought.

What’s remarkable is how critics have shifted their focus from Les Damnés de la Terre back to Black Skin, White Masks. Where earlier debates leaned on rhetoric of oppression and liberation, today’s scholarship often adopts a postmodern, ironically detached stance on socially assigned identities. Anyone revisiting Black Skin, White Masks will be struck by how deftly—and as early as 1952—Fanon dissected “racist mystifications.” From everyday encounters and linguistic cues to literary analysis and clinical case studies, he shows how the “white gaze” turns Black bodies into living stigmas. With this debut, Fanon inaugurated a critical theory of racism, treating “race” not as an objective essence (in Hannah Arendt’s terms) but as a construct arising from specific social conditions.

A phenomenology of racism

The problem of recognition

After World War II, French intellectuals were preoccupied with Hegel’s master–slave dialectic and the problem of mutual recognition—a struggle that, for Hegel, precedes life-and-death conflict. As Merleau-Ponty observed in 1946, “In Hegel, everything that has happened in philosophy for a century began.” Yet the phenomenologist’s influence on Fanon is still underestimated. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon directly responds to this Hegelian inheritance, exposing the stark power imbalance between colonizer and colonized. Even if the “slave” gains formal freedom, true recognition as an autonomous self does not follow. “For Hegel, recognition is reciprocal,” Fanon writes. “Here, the Master only summons the slave’s labour; he demands not recognition but work. And labour alone cannot abolish the struggle for recognition.” Whereas Hegel’s slave turns from Master to object, Fanon’s slave is forced back toward the Master, compelled to reveal the object of colonial power.

Fanon’s critique extends beyond philosophy into leftist theory and art. He attacked surrealist André Breton and existentialist Sartre for claiming the négritude writers—Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor—as their own, even as he consistently praised ethnographers like Michel Leiris. For both Leiris and Fanon, négritude was a temporary stance that enabled Black poets to assert “the integrity of their person” against “white arrogance.” Yet Fanon warned that négritude risked replicating racist mystifications. Modern postcolonial scholars such as Stuart Hall, by contrast, celebrate négritude as “a powerful and creative force” for today’s marginalized voices.

Fanon moved beyond representational strategies because he feared they fixated on the stigmatized body. He demanded recognition as a thinking subject, not merely a racialized object: “O my body, let me always be a man who questions!” In Les Damnés de la Terre, he hoped that anticolonial fighters would realize it was in everyone’s interest to end the conflict and acknowledge the sovereignty of colonized peoples—a goal achievable only through the nation-state. His paradoxical calls for “a national consciousness without nationalism” and “an international consciousness” reveal the tension between the perils of narrow nationalism and the promise of global emancipation. He returns again to recognition when he insists, “Consciousness of self is not self-confrontation but communication.”

Readers seeking neat solutions in Fanon’s theories of class and violence will be disappointed: his work provokes questions rather than provides answers. In her new German biography Frantz Fanon (Nautilus, 2025), Cherice Cherki highlights Fanon’s “semiotic infiltration of language” as his strategy against French colonialism. In the postcolonial era, we must again ask: what vocabulary can grasp contemporary power structures and foster genuine dialogue between North and South? Perhaps today we might begin a similar infiltration of neoliberal globalism—reviving the “real inventions and discoveries” Fanon deemed essential to overcoming Eurocentrism.