Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophy professors sometimes spend an entire episode doing a deep dive of a single text.

I'm David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Ellie Anderson.

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Ellie, today we're going to be talking about a text that is really important in philosophy,

but also in some ways very unique, and that is Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

It is a wonderful text that has been quite influential in a number of fields, including

political theory, decolonial philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, psychoanalysis,

you name it, the text has left its mark.

And the reason that I say it's also a unique text is because it's a text that was written at the very end

of Fanon's life when he was dying from leukemia in the 1960s. And so it is Fanon's final word

to the world. And the text is written both as a work of philosophy, but it also reads very much like a manifesto of sorts, which is why it doesn't really have a lot of references or citations. And so that makes it somewhat challenging from the standpoint of a scholar.

Yeah, although I'll say that's really standard for text written in French at this time.

The French rarely cite a lot of other thinkers.

No, that's true.

But it also gives the text a poignancy and a sense of urgency that is very powerful and that you sense as a reader when you're moving through the pages. It's a text

that I've read in the past as a student that I have taught now that I am a professor. And each time

I read it, there are new things that come to the foreground. And so I'm really happy that we're

doing this closer look on this text.

Yeah.

Well, and in fact, so I think one of the important things to mention about this text is that it was banned in France upon publication.

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