The Role of Violence in the Works of Wright and Fanon (Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon ) (Critical Essay)
By The Black Scholar
- Release Date: 2009-03-22
- Genre: Social Science
Description
Violence and Colonialism RICHARD WRIGHT and Frantz Fanon have been criticized by some and defended by others for the violence associated with their works. But the critics are wrong and defenders ignorant, because they fail to grasp that the violence they describe is not the creation of either writer, but derived from the violence that structured the societies in which they survived. Fanon was born in Martinique, part of the Caribbean islands that once provided the Western world with its greatest riches through the exploitation of African slave labor to produce sugar. This wealth, as a variety of scholars have shown, provided the basis for the industrial revolution, while Africa and the Caribbean were condemned to the poverty and violence which mar their societies to date (C.L.R. James, 1980; Walter Rodney 1982; Richard Hart 1980, 1985, 1998, 2007; Eric Williams 1993). Fanon experienced violence directly when he won medals fighting for France in World War II, from his work as a psychiatrist working in colonial Algeria, and when he was involved on the side of the Algerians in the Alergian War of Independence as a member of the National Liberation Front.
