Adam Shatz, Zadie Smith
100 Years of Frantz Fanon
Rethinking the Canon
Adam Shatz
US Editor, The London Review of Books, New York
in discussion with
Zadie Smith
Writer, London
Had he been alive, Frantz Fanon would have been a hundred this year; he fell short of that by sixty-four years. He is now an established member of the canon of postcolonial thinkers and has long been considered a key figure in the Algerian struggle for independence, to the extent that his Martiniquan origins and his not being able to understand any Arabic are details seldom remembered. His theoretical contributions to a global left might nevertheless be considered of crucial importance, regardless of the empirical details on which many of them were (not) based.
Adam Shatz and Zadie Smith will discuss Fanon’s life, contributions, relevance, and legacy, in the company of Susan Neiman.
Adam Shatz is the New York editor of the London Review of Books, and Frantz Fanon’s most recent biographer. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon was published in 2024.
Zadie Smith is a writer. Her first novel, White Teeth, was published before she finished her degree at Cambridge University and was a critical as well as a commercial success. Her most recent novel is The Fraud (2023).