[7] As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization[8] and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

The disruption of imports from Metropolitan France led to major shortages on the island, which were exacerbated by an American naval blockade imposed on Martinique in April 1943.

Robert's authoritarian regime repressed local Allied sympathizers, hundreds of whom escaped to nearby Caribbean islands.

[19] In January 1943, he fled Martinique during the wedding of one of his brothers and travelled to the British colony of Dominica in order to link up with other Allied sympathizers.

[20]: 24 Robert's regime was overthrown by a local uprising in June of that year, which Fanon would later acclaim as "the birth of the [Martinican] proletariat" as a revolutionary force.

After the uprising, Fanon "enthusiastically" returned to Martinique, where Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had appointed Henri Tourtet as the colony's new governor.

Tourtet subsequently raised the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion to serve in Free French Forces (FFL), and Fanon soon joined the unit in Fort-de-France.

He was subsequently transferred to a Free French military base in Béjaïa, Algeria, where Fanon witnessed firsthand the antisemitism and Islamophobia of the pieds-noirs, many of whom had supported racist laws promulgated by the Vichy regime.

[23] In August 1944, he departed on another troopship from Oran to France as part of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of German-occupied Provence.

Staying in Martinique long enough to complete his baccalauréat, Fanon proceeded to return to France, where he intended on studying medicine and psychiatry.

[citation needed] Fanon was educated in Lyon, where he also studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures.

Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, after having made contact with Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955.

Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the Kabylia region, to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians.

These trips were also a means for clandestine activities, notably in his visits to the ski resort of Chrea which hid an FLN base.

[34] As Lewis R. Gordon points out, the circumstances of Fanon's stay are somewhat disputed: "What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia.

"[32] Fanon subsequently died from double pneumonia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961 after finally having begun his leukemia treatment, although far too late.

[35] He had been admitted under the name of Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.

[38] Black Skin, White Masks was first published in French as Peau noire, masques blancs in 1952 and is one of Fanon's most important works.

As a result, it has been argued Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence (it would be more accurate to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence) and that his ideas have been extremely oversimplified.

Fanon's three books were supplemented by numerous psychiatry articles as well as radical critiques of French colonialism in journals such as Esprit and El Moudjahid.

The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature.

It was to them that his final work, Les damnés de la terre (translated into English by Constance Farrington as The Wretched of the Earth) was directed.

[39] Fanon was influenced by a variety of thinkers and intellectual traditions including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Négritude, and Marxism.

In particular, Les damnés de la terre was a major influence on the work of revolutionary leaders such as Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in the United States and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba.

In 1970 Bobby Seale, the Chairman of the BPP, published a collection of recorded observations made while he was incarcerated entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P.

[52] In August 2021 Fanon's book Voices of liberation was one of those brought by Elisa Loncón to the new "plurinational library" of the Constitutional Convention of Chile.

More recently, radical South African poor people's movements, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (meaning 'people who live in shacks' in Zulu), have been influenced by Fanon's work.

His work serves as an important theoretical gloss for writers including Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Senegal's Ken Bugul and Ousmane Sembène, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Ngũgĩ goes so far to argue in Decolonizing the Mind (1992) that it is "impossible to understand what informs African writing" without reading Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.

Thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson have taken up Fanon's ontological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic analyses of the Negro and the "zone of non-being" in order to develop theories of anti-Blackness.