This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.com.

Franz Fanon was a physician, a psychiatrist, but also very much a political philosopher.

Born in the French colony Martinique, he was perhaps most famous for his book Black-Skin

White Masks, a powerful critique of colonialism and white racism. In this episode of The Philosophy

By Its podcast, Lewis Gordon, author of What Fanon said, introduces and contextualizes some of the key ideas of this radical existentialist

thinker. Lewis Gordon, welcome to Philosophy Bites. I am delighted to be here. We're talking today

about France Fanon. I know he had a very short and eventful. I tell us a little bit about him. Sure. Fence Fennon died at the age of

36, so a very short life. He was born 1925 in the island of Martinique, same year as Malcolm X,

Patrice Lumumba, in other words, a year of revolutionaries. But since this is short bites, the very quick answer is,

Franz Fanon is a rock star, superstar,

canonical figure not only in the global South,

but in philosophy and in psychiatry and in revolutionary thought.

He is there with individuals like Che Guevara, Karl Marx, etc.

So you mentioned he was born in Martinique. Is there a link between the culture in which he's raised and his philosophy?

Many people would say no, I would absolutely say yes. And part of this is because

Franz Phelan grew up speaking Creole. He was from a colony. He's very famous for his writings on

colonization and decolonization. So being born in a colony makes sense to be known for work about colonies. So that's one thing.

The other thing is the Creole language. It's not one language, it's many languages combined.

He spoke an Afro-Francophone Creole. That's a language in which there is, for example,

no separation between the person and the body.

Phelan's humanism, I have argued in my writings, is connected to his refusal to separate dignity

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