A Dying Colonialism

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on anticolonialism and the fifth year of the
Algerian Revolution. Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon
was one of the great political analysts of our time, the author of such
seminal works of modern revolutionary theory as The Wretched of the Earth
and Black Skin, White Masks. He has had a profound impact on civil rights,
anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world. A
Dying Colonialism is Fanon's incisive and illuminating account of how,
during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old
cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long
derided by their colonialist oppressors as "primitive," in order to destroy
those oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a
point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of
colonial oppression. This is a strong, lucid, and militant book; to read it
is to understand why Fanon says that for the colonized, "having a gun is
the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death."