Frantz Fanon, the radical psychiatrist and anti-colonial philosopher, was not a sociologist but has shaped so much critical sociological thought. Julian Go, Professor of Sociology, joins us to reflect on the life, work and significance of one the twentieth century’s most important - and at times misunderstood - thinkers, who was born a French citizen in Martinique, went on to fight for France in WWII, and then against it in Algeria’s struggle for independence.

Julian tells us about encountering Fanon in gradschool, and the reward of sitting with his work. He talks us through the core ideas of Fanon’s landmark books ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ and ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ and explains how, through Fanon, we can see concepts such as postcolonial and cosmopolitan differently. Reflecting on Fanon’s time as a soldier fighting for France and his work as a psychiatrist in Algeria, Julian tells explains Fanon showed us about the ‘social logics’ of colonialism, and explains why his life and thought deserve to be situated in a wider picture of twentieth century anticolonial struggle - and why we must place his work at the very centre of sociological thought and intellectual history. For, as Julian reminds us, to study colonialism and imperialism is far from “niche”; rather “it is to study one of the dominant socio-political formations of modernity”.

Guest: Julian Go; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truon; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find out more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Julian Go

• Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US
• Fanon's Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism
• Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory
• Thinking against empire: Anticolonial thought as social theory

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Listen to Hannah Proctor on Burnout, Angelique Nixon on Desire, Les Back on Listening and Brenda Herbert on Childhood - all engaging with Fanon's ideas. 
• Listen to Manuela Boatca on Europeans, for a discussion of Martinique as an ‘outermost region' of the European Union

Further resources

• Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks
• Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth 
• The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
• Frantz Fanon
• WEB Du Bois
• Aimé Césaire
• Martinique

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