African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of the Empire

Abstract

A foundational figure in the development of critical race theory and decolonial thought, Frantz Fanon is often mythologized as a sui generis thinker. In a recent rereading of Fanon’s life and work, Christopher J. Lee pushes back against this tendency by rooting Fanon’s evolution as a theorist of race and decolonization in his formative experiences as a young migrant crisscrossing the French empire over three continents. Fanon’s boyhood in Martinique ended when he went to fight with the Free French, first inMorocco and later inmetropolitan France; he then left the Caribbean for good after the war to finish his education in France and launch his psychiatric career in Algeria. Through soldiering and studying—wellworn pathways that put young people in empires on themove—Fanon came to know the contradictionsof being a black Frenchmanunder the conditions of late colonialism firsthand. Lee argues it was precisely Fanon’s personalmobility and the expansive geographyof his early life that underlay his “uncanny ability” to interpret the world in which he lived.