Fanon, revolutionary playwright

La lutte continue: Louis Mars and the genesis of ethnopsychiatry.

“…According to Mars (1970), the International Committee for the Treatment of Mental Illnesses was impressed by the center and was inspired to create similar centers in Liberia, Iran, and in Pakistan. This is one more parallelism with the career of Fanon, who experimented with day hospitalization in psychiatry because “mental illness is presented as a veritable pathology of freedom,” and classic hospitalization condemns the patient “to exercise his freedom in the unreal world of fantasy” (Fanon, 2018, p. 497). But in Haiti, where freedom had been secured in 1804, the loss of freedom through Kline’s outpatient structure was further buoyed by his extreme enthusiasm for pharmacological interventions.…”

“…Given that Mars actually began using the hyphenated term in a 1951 publication, it is certainly possible, but not certain, that he was the first to use it. But John Colin Carothers wrote a subsequent and very different book on ethnopsychiatry, The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry in 1954, and Fanon (2018) would emerge as a major critic of colonial ethnopsychiatry in 1955 with his essay “Ethnopsychiatric Considerations.” Specifically, he observed it to be a method of reifying biological conceptions of race through psychiatric institutionalization (Fanon, 2018). This difference in conception can be attributed to the aforementioned 19th-century Haitian encounter with European anthropology, adapted in the early 20th century to a Haitian and pan-Africanist construct of ethnology, which Louis Mars leveraged to yield a locally fashioned concept of ethnopsychiatry as comparative and cultural psychiatry in Haiti’s postcolonial context.…”

“…For Fanon, by contrast, theorization of ethnopsychiatry emerged from colonial, segregationist, psychiatric contexts of French-colonized Algeria. To date, no research has revealed direct or indirect dialogue between Mars and Fanon; however, implausible it might appear that these two prominent Caribbean psychiatrists had no interaction, and their lack of engagement may point to the striking differences between early to mid-20th century independent Haitian and French Martiniquan environments, differences to which Fanon alluded in his essay “In the Caribbean, Birth of a Nation?” (Fanon, 2018).…”

Decolonization unnamed: Echoes of healing and refusal in the face of dehumanization and alienation.

“…In this article, we wish to highlight two interrelated colonial violences in particular: alienation and dehumanization. By alienation , we mean the depth of pain, anguish, grief, and human suffering associated with the multiplicity of violences that colonial systems employ when separating and alienating colonized bodies from place (Bell, 2016; Fanon, 2018; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2020). These violences involve all the ways in which systems in settler colonies and postcolonial states displace, remove, and disaffect the colonized from any sense of belonging to the lands, belonging to Indigenous identities, and belonging to “humanity” overall.…”

Fanon Matters: Relevance of Frantz Fanon's Intellectual and Political Work for Peace Studies

“…Robert Young emphasizes the influence of Simone de Beauvoir in one of the subthemes of the play, a feminist critique of masculinist values and forms of leadership. After the destruction and the defeat of the hero, what emerges is the unexpected reconstruction of society manifested in the change of its gender politics, whereby the women assume the new direction of the society (Young, 2018). In Les damnés de la terre Fanon does not bring up the feminist critique of violence, but he is also presenting a different understanding of violence than that of the heroic individual who aims at setting the world on fire in order to restart again.…”