The Wretched of the Earth

by

Frantz Fanon

Themes and Colors
Colonialism, Racism, and Violence Theme Icon
Oppression and Mental Health Theme Icon
Capitalism, Socialism, and the Third World Theme Icon
Decolonization, Neocolonialism, and Social Class Theme Icon
Culture and the Emerging Nation  Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wretched of the Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Colonialism, Racism, and Violence

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a critical look at colonialism, the practice of taking political control of another country with the intention of establishing a settlement and exploiting the people economically. Colonialism began in Europe around the 15th century, and it is still practiced today in some parts of the world. Fanon, a French West Indian from Martinique, a French colony located in the eastern Caribbean Sea, had a personal interest…

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Oppression and Mental Health

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is an examination of the psychological effects of colonialism. Fanon was a practicing psychiatrist in France, and later in Algeria during the Algerian War of Independence—a war fought between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front between 1954 and 1962, which resulted in Algeria becoming an independent nation. Fanon was particularly interested in the psychological impact of colonialism on the colonized individual. The colonial situation, Fanon contends…

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Capitalism, Socialism, and the Third World

While Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is primarily focused on the fundamental confrontation of colonialism and anticolonialism, the book is also concerned with the confrontation of capitalism and socialism. When Fanon wrote his book in 1961, the Cold War was in full swing, and it further complicated the colonial situation and the struggle for independence in the colonized world. The Cold War was an extended period of political tension between the socialist Soviet Union…

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Decolonization, Neocolonialism, and Social Class

The Wretched of the Earth follows the struggles of the colonized nation and its move to independence in a process known as decolonization, which, plainly put, is the undoing of colonialism and the oppression that goes along with it. The primary way in which a new nation is built is through the development of national consciousness, a shared national identity that identifies people as collective parts of an independent nation. However, the problem…

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Culture and the Emerging Nation

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that one of the ways in which colonial forces oppress colonized individuals is through the erasure of black culture. Racist colonial powers claim that colonized countries, especially those on the continent of Africa, are devoid of culture and meaningful artistic expression. The absence of culture is considered the height of barbarism, and colonialism assumes that in the precolonial period, Africa “was akin to a darkness of…

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