Adam Shatz Discusses Frantz Fanon with Lydia Polgreen
Join Unnameable Books and BPL Presents as Adam Shatz discusses The Rebel’s Clinic, his biography of the writer-activist who inspired today’s movements for social and racial justice with Lydia Polgreen.
In the era of Black Lives Matter and war in Gaza, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller.
Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life—and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Participants
Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.”
Lydia Frances Polgreen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times. Prior to that she was the head of content for Gimlet Media, the editor-in-chief of HuffPost and editorial director for NYT Global, and the West Africa bureau chief for the same publication, based in Dakar, Senegal, from 2005 to 2009. She won many awards, including the Livingston award in 2009. She also reported from India. She was then based in Johannesburg, South Africa where she was The New York Times Johannesburg Bureau Chief.
BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
