Clinician and revolutionary: Frantz Fanon, biography, and the history of colonial medicine

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 81, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 823-841

  Keller, Richard C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

Algeria; Biography; Colonial medicine; Frantz Fanon; Psychiatry

Indexed keywords

ALGERIA; ART; ARTICLE; AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT; DEVELOPING COUNTRY; FRANCE; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PSYCHIATRY;

ALGERIA; BIOGRAPHY AS TOPIC; COLONIALISM; DEVELOPING COUNTRIES; FRANCE; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MOTION PICTURES AS TOPIC; PORTRAITS AS TOPIC; PSYCHIATRY;

EID: 38049098670     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2007.0120     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Florence Nightingale cited in David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 3;
2. David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in South Africa (New York: Harper, 1858), pp. 141-47.
3. "Plan type de panneau pour hall d'information," Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, SAS/DOC/5.
4. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism [Paris: Maspéro, 1959], trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), pp. 121-22.
5. Quoted in Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (United Kingdom: Normal Films/Arts Council of England, 1995; California Newsreel, dist).
6. See also Homi K. Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative," in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 40-65, esp. p. 40.
7. See, e.g., Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
8. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991);
9. Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
10. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
11. See also Warwick Anderson, "Postcolonial Histories of Medicine," in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, ed. John Harley Warner and Frank Huisman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
12. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Paris: Seuil, 1952], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967). Fanon then submitted a more traditional thesis, entitled "Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l'hérédo-dégénération spino- cérébelleuse: à propos d'un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession" (med. thesis, Lyon, 1952).
13. Frantz Fanon, "Le syndrôme nord-africain" [1952], in Pour la révolution africaine: Écrits politiques (Paris: Maspéro, 1964), pp. 13-25.
14. For a history of the Algiers School, see Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
15. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [Paris: Maspéro, 1961], trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1965).
16. Belkacem Krim quoted in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (London: Granta, 2000; New York: Picador, 2001), p. 4.
17. Peter Geismar, Fanon (New York: Dial, 1971).
18. See also Irene Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 76;
19. Jock McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 101-7;
20. Hussein Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), esp. pp. 207-25.
21. Françoise Vergès, "Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism: Fanon and Freedom," in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), pp. 46-75. Vergès, who has rigorously integrated Fanon's lives as psychiatrist and theorist, represents an important exception among postcolonial critics.
22. See also Richard C. Keller, "Pinel in the Maghreb: Liberation, Confinement, and Psychiatric Reform in French North Africa," Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 79: 459-99.
23. Julien, Frantz Fanon (n. 4).
24. "Lettre au Ministre-Résident," in Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine (n. 7), pp. 59-62, on p. 60.
25. The links between Fanon and Lacan have prompted deep debate among his biographers: see esp. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Critical Fanonism," Crit. Inquiry, 1991, 17: 457-70, on p. 461;
26. Albert-James Arnold, "Les lectures de Fanon au prisme américain: Des révolutionnaires aux révisionnistes," Les temps modernes, 2005-6, 61: 118-35.
27. See Macey, Frantz Fanon (n. 10), for discussion of this experiment.
28. Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2000), p. 11. (Subsequent references will be parenthetical.)
29. Macey, Frantz Fanon (n. 10). (Subsequent references will be parenthetical.)
30. See also my review in Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 79: 156-58.
31. Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait [Paris: Seuil, 2000], trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). (Subsequent references will be parenthetical.)
32. Julien, Frantz Fanon (n. 4).
33. Abdenour Zahzah and Bachir Ridouh, Frantz Fanon: Mémoires d'asile (Algeria: Anwar Cinéma, 2002; Mille et Une Productions, Paris, dist.).
34. Ibid.
35. See, e.g., Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
36. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972);
37. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973);
38. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978);
39. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone, 1989).
40. Sec esp. David Scott, "Colonial Governmentality," Social Text, 1995, 43: 191-220;
41. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995);
42. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
43. For medicine and culture see, among many of his works, Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
44. For the work of political economy and health, see Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
45. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
46. João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
47. See esp. Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam (n. 5);
48. Lynette Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005);
49. Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and "the African Mind" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
50. and Robert Berthelier, L'homme maghrébin dans la littérature psychiatrique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994), among others.
51. For reviews of this literature, see Richard C. Keller, "Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962," J. Soc. Hist., 2001, 35: 295-326;
52. René Collignon, "La psychiatrie coloniale française en Algérie et au Sénégal," Revue Tiers Monde, 2006, 187: 527-46.
53. For example, Fanon is absent in the following works, despite their ready engagement with a wide range of theoretical perspectives on colonialism, medicine, and the operation of power: David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
54. Arnold, Imperial Medicine (n. 1);
55. Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalizalion, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999);
56. Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
57. and even Shula Marks, "What Is Colonial about Colonial Medicine? And What Has Happened to Imperialism and Health?" Soc. Hist. Med., 1997, 10: 205-19.
58. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (n. 5), p. 14.
59. For another productive use of Fanon, see Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 5, 14.
60. Olivier Douville, "Ya-t-il une actualité clinique de Fanon?" Information psychiatrique, 2006, 71: 697-715, on p. 712.
61. For more on this relationship, see Richard C. Keller, "Geographies of Power, Legacies of Mistrust: Colonial Medicine in the Global Present," Hist. Geog, 2006, 34: 26-48.
62. As Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (n. 5), p. 15, notes, "Fanon wrote within, not outside, the existing colonial literature on psychology and psychopathology."