He is 36 years old. The Wretched of the Earth was an immediate success. (…) In 1961, the year of the coup in Algiers and the opening of the negotiations of Evian, Fanon, seriously ill with leukemia, he works feverishly on the manuscript. 'Raised by the opposition to the war in Algeria, by the challenge to an already dying colonial system, recently encouraged the exaltation of the armed struggle for victory in Cuba of the Castro rebels preaching a revolutionary Third World, crowned by the preface of a Sartre then at the height of his influence and glory, the book spread like wildfire. The book is also the culmination of the works of Fanon - disciple of Aimé Césaire-, an adaptation of Marxist theory to the colonial context, and a precursor of postcolonial studies. The Wretched of the Earth is a psychiatric, political, cultural and historical diagnosis of the colonization in Algeria particularly and in Africa in general, in addition to constituting a call to the Third World to undertake the decolonizing struggle, that is, to create a new man. It was published in 1961 in France accompanied by a preface by Jean Paul Sartre. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty.īringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.The Wretched of the Earth was the last book that Frantz Fanon wrote.

These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether.

The colonists took over the colonized by using military tanks and guns, and they continue to control them in the same way. According to him, decolonization is never achieved without violence. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an a world without colonialism.įramed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. The Wretched of the Earth begins with Frantz Fanon’s explanation about violence in colonial situations. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability.

The wretched of the world