Nimble and engrossing ... An examplary work ... At times as I read The Rebel’s Clinic, I yearned for a little more insight not into Fanon the brilliant doctor or Fanon the rousing revolutionary but Fanon the person ... Eloquent.
Absorbing ... Shatz...is a mostly steady hand in turbulent waters ... Part of what gives The Rebel’s Clinic its intellectual heft is Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions.
Sober and thorough ... One gift of The Rebel’s Clinic is that it amplifies the radical nature of Fanon’s work within the hospital setting ... hatz spends enough time complicating the language around violence that we lose sight of the fact that Fanon saw the undivided collective—rather than any particular means to bring it about, violent or otherwise—as the key to resistance, that which he celebrated, codified, and offered back to the world.
Insightful ... Shatz is a sober and informed guide to this territory. He is an erudite writer, and not afraid to show off his erudition. But while this makes for a less snappy narrative, his frequent detours into the intellectual currents that surrounded Fanon...are useful.
Captures the restless energy that makes Frantz Fanon such a compelling figure ... Given Fanon’s continuing influence, from the seminar room to social media to the streets, few would object to another effort to tell the story of his extraordinary life. Adam Shatz is well positioned to do so ... The book’s many supporting characters are skillfully evoked.
Shatz brings existing accounts of Fanon’s life together with published memoirs of people who knew him, new interviews and interpretations of his writing ... The author’s primary concern is less to do with situating Fanon in a collective history than with offering a portrait, as he puts it, of a 'man', not an icon ... Fanon’s attention to the lived scale of everyday life, as well as to how bodies and minds are socially produced, still offers us examples for rethinking and rebuilding a lived politics of both care and critique.
A strength of The Rebel’s Clinic is the meticulous charting of the schools and figures that influenced Fanon’s thought ... Does not reveal a strikingly different Fanon than does David Macey’s deeply researched Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000). But it delivers a smoother, often engrossing, narrative, one that deserves to be the first stop for anyone looking for an introduction to Fanon’s life and work.
An impressive accomplishment ... The range is impressive (if gendered) and has the virtue of putting Fanon into conversation with a variety of perspectives, but Fanon sometimes gets lost in the crowd ... Skillful as these chapters are in presenting Fanon’s shifting contexts, the man himself remains elusive.
Treating its subject with a healthy dose of veneration and criticism, Shatz’s book is also a remarkable work of intellectual synthesis ... In his effort to demythologize Fanon as a revolutionary, Shatz sometimes obscures the reasons why Macey called him the "apostle of violence" ... When confronted with the more revolutionary, more nationalistic, more violent, and more truculent Fanons, Shatz’s book can emit a note of high-minded frustration or bewildered rebuke.
Thoroughly researched ... A deep meditation on the transformative power and influence of one radical philosophical writer on the continuing fight for justice on many fronts.
...a superb example of historical biography ... For Shatz, Fanon must be criticised as well as admired. And his writings must be contextualised within the different historical epoch in which he lived. But Fanon is still relevant because 'the racial divisions and economic inequalities that he protested were not so much liquidated as reconfigured.' It is no wonder, then, that Fanon is an icon for many anti-racist activists today. Fanon speaks to us because he sought to create a new world free of the domination of the old.
In this timely and engaging new book...Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon’s life and work ... At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply misread and distorted, The Rebel’s Clinic helps us return to all of Fanon—the fullness of his thought and practice beyond the familiar aphorisms ... At the same time, Fanon’s thinking about anticolonial violence cannot be understood apart from his sophisticated analysis of the nature of colonial violence, which Shatz largely overlooks.
Shatz...writes in an accessible and engaging style. His admiration for Fanon is clear, but he isn’t overawed by him. What emerges from The Rebel’s Clinic is a nuanced portrait of a complex man and how his thinking, influenced by his psychiatric practice and his participation in the Algerian independence struggle, evolved. While Shatz avoids sanctifying Fanon, he makes a compelling case for Fanon as a thinker of global significance, whose insights about power and resistance, along with his unshakeable commitment to a social order firmly rooted in dignity, justice, and mutual recognition, have endured and remain influential and relevant. The anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century may have passed, but in many ways the world remains in the grip of a colonial mindset which produces conditions that lead to inequality, injustice, destruction of the ecosystem and violence.
