Frantz Fanon and the decolonial turn in psychology: from modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude

Frantz Fanon, one of the foremost theoreticians of racism, colonization, and decolonization was a psychiatrist by training who wrote about psychology, social theory, and philosophy, among other areas. In his “work in psychology” Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon declares that he will “leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians.” In the face of colonial methods and attitudes, he searches for a decolonial attitude that seeks to “build the world of you.” With the search for this attitude at its core, Fanon’s corpus makes the case for a decolonial turn in psychology that poses the primacy of attitude over method in knowledge production. In such a form, psychology becomes a decolonial transdisciplinary practice that is close to decolonized versions of other fields in the human sciences, such as philosophy, sociology, history, literature, and political theory, as well as to decolonial activism and praxis.