The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-colonialist activist who died prematurely in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, has since left its mark on generations of anti-colonialists, civil rights activists and specialists in postcolonial studies. Since the publication of his books ( Black Skin, White Masks , 1952; Year V of the Algerian Revolution , 1959; The Wretched of the Earth , 1961), it has been known that many of his writings remained unpublished or inaccessible. In particular, his psychiatric writings, including those devoted to "colonialist alienation seen through mental illness" (in the words of his editor François Maspero).

This material constitutes the heart of the present volume, established and presented following patient collection work and extensive research by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young. The reader will find the scientific articles published by Fanon, his thesis in psychiatry, as well as some unpublished works and texts published in the internal journal of the Blida-Joinville hospital where he worked from 1953 to 1956. There will also be found two plays written during his medical studies ( L'Œil se noie and Les Mains parallèles ), the correspondence that could be found as well as some texts published in El Moudjahid after 1958, not included in Pour la révolution africaine (1964). This remarkable collection is completed by the correspondence that François Maspero and the writer Giovanni Pirelli exchanged for a project to publish Fanon's complete works, as well as by the reasoned analysis of the latter's library.