Frantz Fanon, by Adam Shatz

On June 27 2024, the Crash team welcomed Adam Shatz for a lecture on Frantz Fanon. 

Frantz Fanon is one of the most influential intellectual figures of the second half of the 20th century. Many personalities and political currents today claim to be the work of a man who lived for only 36 years, but who had a decisive influence on the theoretical construction of the struggle for decolonisation. More recently, at the time of the Hamas offensive in the heart of Israeli territory on 7 October, some activists thought they could justify the massacres by drawing on elements of Fanon's discourse, which legitimises anti-colonial forms of violence.

The publication of a biography of Frantz Fanon by the American journalist and essayist Adam Shatz (Une vie en révolutions, La Découverte, March 2024 / The Rebel's Clinic: The revolutionary life of Frantz Fanon, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is an opportunity to discover - or rediscover - the extraordinarily complex intellectual and activist career of the Martinican doctor. A psychiatrist with radically innovative methods, an admirer of Aimé Césaire but a fierce critic of negritude, a rigorous intellectual but an outspoken propagandist for the FLN cause, an apostle of violence overtaken by his own rhetoric, Frantz Fanon gives us the opportunity to reflect on many of the themes that have permeated Médecins Sans Frontières in recent years: the patient-provider relationship, humanitarian psychiatry, mass violence and identity.

We'd like to invite you to a conference with Adam Shatz to discuss the many aspects of Frantz Fanon's thought and commitment, to separate their finesse from the sometimes unsubtle that can be made of them, and in this way to stimulate several of our internal debates.