Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination

Fanon: The postcolonial imagination

This book is an excellent introduction to the ideas and legacy of Fanon. Gibson explores Fanon as a truly complex character in the context of his time and beyond. He argues that for Fanon, theory has a practical task to help change the world. Thus Fanon’s “untidy dialectic,” Gibson contends, is a philosophy of liberation that includes cultural and historical issues and visions of a future society. In a profoundly political sense, Gibson asks us to reevaluate Fanon’s contribution as a critic of modernity and reassess in a new light notions of consciousness, humanism, and social change.

Caricatured as a mindless apostle of violence, Fanon emerges in Nigel Gibson's rigorous and subtle analysis as a major humanistic thinker about injustice, a serious critic of nationalism and, for the first time, as an impressively profound philosopher of modern post-colonial politics and culture.
- Edward W. Said, Columbia University

Gibson's prose is elegant and clear and this book is, by far, the best introduction to Fanon's life and work. But it does more than this....The key idea that runs throughout the book is that of the dialectic. Gibson argues that there is an unstable, critical and creative element in the heart of Fanon's thought that seeks to move through apparently irreconcilable contradictions. This kind of analysis is what we would expect from any responsible engagement with Fanon's work and Gibson develops it very well. But he goes further and makes an original and significant contribution by showing that for Fanon this kind of progress requires the development of a fighting culture.
- Richard Pithouse, Sunday Independent