Fanon’s Vietnam

This essay speculates on Frantz Fanon's intellectual relationship with Vietnamese anticolonial thinkers, including but not restricted to Hồ Chí Minh (1890–1969) and Trần Đức Thảo (1917–1993). We explore the possible influence of the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle and its theoreticians upon Fanon's theorising as well as similarities between their ideas on colonialism, racism and anticolonial revolt. While the essay does not offer conclusive evidence of direct influence, it nonetheless offers empirically supported speculations about how some of Fanon's anticolonial theorising may have been influenced by political currents and ideas of the Vietnamese struggle. At minimum, we show striking homologies between Fanon's thinking on colonialism, racism, nationalism and anticolonial revolution and that of his Vietnamese counterparts. These similarities reveal a wider field of anticolonial thought that, we suggest, both Fanon and Vietnamese anticolonial theoreticians contributed to and shared.