Brilliant! Thought-provoking and insightful into the forces and structures of decolonialization, and a bit challenging. The prefaces by Sartre and particularly Homi K Bhabha (sesquipedalian though it is) do an excellent job of contextualizing the rest. It is a bit fascinating that Sartre's preface, embracing (reveling in? maybe an ungenerous read of Sartre but it does feel like there is a bit of that) the necessity of violent revolution, criticized by Arendt for encouraging violence that dehumanizes, was removed at the bequest of Fanon's widow from certain editions following Sartre's support of Israel in the Six Day War.

Fanon does seem to have a tendency, not quite unique to himself, of generalizing, globalizing certain paradigms that make the points a bit tenuous at points. The generalization at some points veers into the psychohistorian a la Asimov, analyzing from first principals psychological effects, without much supporting evidence. For paragraphs on end, he will discuss what seems to be some specific history in terms of the natural process of cause and effect disconnected from any other specifics on the ground: "when the colonizers do X, those subjects in the rural towns disconnected from the metropole will do Y, causing this force to well-up within the revolutionary groups." I'm sure some (many?) of his generalizations have merit, but for me it becomes difficult to disentangle, particularly when no concrete histories are used to illustrate their validity. That is to say, it is not always clear to me what parts are remain relevant to the decolonization project today, and what parts are specifically relevant to the place and time of Algeria in 1961.

He also seems to have undisputed faith in the concept of the nationstate, and it being the basis of identity, organization, revolution. This is a bit of a surprise to me, maybe an aspect of the time - he kept on coming right up to where this could be discussed, but would just fall back on the underlying assumption of the supremacy of the nation. There is a section there, of particular interest to me while probably of lesser general import, where he talks about how the colonized intellectual, unconfident in their place in the revolutionary state, will grope among artifacts of precolonial artistic periods in a phony attempt to dredge up a connection. This is, according to Fanon, the wrong way to do art - the correct way is to capture the zeitgeist, be precisely focused on the present. The psychological analysis here does not entirely ring false to me, but I think the other purpose of this reaching into the past is precisely to endeavor to establish the national identity with respect to precolonial culture. And maybe that project is flawed as well! But it does seem to point at the question of: where is the nation coming from? What is the nation? In what cases is the idea necessary to be constructed, and by who?