The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
The bible of decolonization, written by a psychiatrist.
For you if
you want to understand colonialism as a psychological condition as well as a political one
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Fanon was a Martiniquais psychiatrist treating Algerian patients traumatized by the French colonial war. This book — written in ten weeks as he was dying of leukemia — is the result: a theory of colonialism, decolonization, and the psychology of the oppressed that changed the world. Preface by Sartre. Used by liberation movements across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Still the most comprehensive single account of what colonialism does to the minds of everyone it touches — the colonized, the colonizer, and the intellectual caught between them.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Algeria • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Algerian author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
A Clockwork Orange(1971)
dir. Stanley Kubrick
State violence dressed up as your rehabilitation.
In a near-future Britain, teenage gang leader Alex is imprisoned for ultraviolence and subjected to an experimental state conditioning program meant to strip him of the capacity for violent choice. Adapted from Anthony Burgess's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to resolve the discomfort — Alex is a monster, and the state's "cure" is its own kind of monstrous. Pedagogical in forcing the question of whether choosing evil is more human than being engineered into goodness.
The Battle of Algiers(1966)
dir. Gillo Pontecorvo
Studied by insurgents and the Pentagon alike.
Docudrama reconstruction of the FLN's urban guerrilla campaign against French colonial rule in Algiers, shot in a deliberately newsreel-like style with mostly non-professional actors.
Why it’s here: Reconstructed with a documentary's texture and an insurgency's actual tactics — studied for decades by both sides of colonial conflict, reportedly including the Pentagon itself ahead of the Iraq occupation. A rare case of a film about power becoming an actual tactical document, not just a representation of one.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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Homer's Odyssey, reborn in the Caribbean.
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A mermaid caught by tourists. A fisherman sets her free.
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The Broken Spears
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The conquest of Mexico, told by the conquered.
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Malinche
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History's most complicated woman gets her own voice.
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Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
