Alienation and Freedom

Frantz Fanon, the famed psychiatrist and political philosopher, needs little introduction. The author of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s small library of work produced during his brief life of thirty-six years, cut short by cancer, has nonetheless inspired new academic fields and an expansive secondary literature. Alienation and Freedom, a new collection of Fanon’s writings edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young and translated by Steven Corcoran, is yet another addition to this corpus, though one of special significance. First published in French by La Découverte in 2015, Alienation and Freedom is the first major collection of writing by Fanon to be published in over fifty years, since the 1964 release of Pour la révolution africaine. This book is therefore a cause for celebration among Fanonists, but also a compendium that should be of keen interest to scholars of anti-colonialism, decolonization and the history of medicine.