Hannah Zeavin Interviews Adam Shatz
Image from BOOKFORUM (Winter 2024)
Adam Shatz discusses his new biography of Frantz Fanon in a new interview with Hannah Zeavin.
Fanon was a psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist. Born in Martinique in 1925, he trained as a psychiatrist in France before he became the director of a psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. There, he began to work with the National Liberation Front (FLN) and later went into exile in Tunisia. Fanon died at the age of thirty-six in Bethesda, Maryland, after receiving delayed treatment for leukemia at the National Institutes of Health—arranged for by the CIA. Most famously, Fanon is the author of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). His legacy persists—sometimes paradoxically—in the work of contemporary psychoanalysts, Afro-Pessimist theory, decolonial thinkers, liberation movements, and beyond.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology and media, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of History (Science / North America) in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.