Frantz Fanon's 1961 analysis of colonialism, decolonization, and the psychology of the colonized — arguing that colonial violence could only be overcome through counter-violence, that the colonized must create new national cultures rather than imitating Europe, and that the pitfalls of national consciousness threatened to reproduce colonial structures after independence.
Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth while dying of leukemia in 1961, the year after seventeen African nations gained independence. He had been a psychiatrist in French Algeria treating both Algerian patients traumatized by torture and French soldiers traumatized by administering it. The book he wrote from that experience has never stopped being read — in the 1960s Black Power movement, in postcolonial studies, in Ferguson and Palestine and everywhere that colonialism's aftermath is being reckoned with.