Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacobin when I'll be presenting the show.

Franz Fanon was one of the most influential revolutionary thinkers of the last century. Born in Martinique, Fanon played an active role in the Algerian struggle for independence.

In books like Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon transformed our understanding of racism in European colonial rule, all this in a life that ended at the age of 36.

Our guest today is Peter Hudus. Peter teaches philosophy at Oakton Community College and is the author of Franz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades.

What was the particular context of Martinique and the French ruled Caribbean into which Franz Fanon was born and where he spent his formative years? And how did it differ from the French colonies in Africa, for example?

Martinique, like Guadalupe, like other French English poichiguis, or Dutch-speaking areas in the Caribbean over the years in Spanish, was a colonial settler state.

Not that unlike in a certain sense, some of the African colonies of France. It was a deeply racist society in which there was profound racial segregation.

There was a situation where historically the vast majority of people who had constituted the population of Martinique were blacks from Africa with a small ruling elite known as the Bex, which consisted of either French settlers or mixed settlers, Creoles, who dominated the entire life of the society economically and politically, certainly in the period that Fanon was growing up, representing, however, no more than a few percentage points of the population.

But Fanon himself grew up in a somewhat sheltered environment. He grew up in a middle-class family, or might say, a lower middle-class family, and the mark of status in a colonial situation like the French Caribbean was language.

If you spoke good French, you could write in good French, quote unquote, good French, instead of Creole, this was a marker of open mobility, and his family, especially his mother, took great pains to encourage that development in him.

So he was fluent in French from an early age, and became quite proficient in it. That's an important phenomenon, because in the French colonial system, a blacks in the Caribbean was seen on a somewhat higher level than blacks in southern Africa.

Because of the connection to the French language. So when Fanon grew up, to a large extent, he and his friends and family didn't particularly view themselves in terms of an African identity.

This is something that begins to emerge as he's a teenager in response to developments occurring in the island, especially surrounding World War II in his outbreak.

But he doesn't think of himself. He thinks of himself as a part of France. After all, places like Martinique and Guadeloupe were part of Metropolitan France, and they were considered themselves an integral part of this French empire.

And of course, there was resistance among the black populace to the discrimination that was being made out against them.

But Fanon really becomes radicalized really once he leaves Martinique, which is the first time he leaves, it's during World War II.

The Caribbean had been the size of arguably the first anti-colonial revolution, the great slave revolt in Haiti, long before the European conquest of Africa had actually been completed.

Would that have been a reference point for Fanon, either in his youth or at a later stage in his life?

Well, definitely yes. He actually doesn't write that much directly about the Haitian revolution in his writings, but you can see the impact of it throughout his thought implicitly at the very least.

And also by negative example, what I mean by that is what Fanon often talks about, especially in his first book, Black Skin White Masks, but in his very earliest writings as well, is the fact that in the Antilles freedom was not won as it was in Haiti through a revolution.

This freedom of black slaves at least, the end of slavery was achieved in 1848 by the French deciding to get out of the slave trade and grant abolition.

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