The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon’s writings. As a philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its facets. Change is the thread that ties together his critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and his intellectual exchange with Césaire, Kojève, and Sartre. It informs his analysis of racism and colonialism, négritude and the veil, language and culture, disalienation and decolonization, and it underpins his reflections on Martinique, Algeria, the Caribbean, Africa, the Third World, and the world at large.

Gavin Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon’s work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. Arnall offers close readings of Fanon’s entire oeuvre, from canonical works like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands. Speaking both to scholars and to the continued vitality of Fanon’s ideas among today’s social movements, this book offers a rigorous and profoundly original engagement with Fanon that affirms his importance in the effort to bring about radical change.

"Gavin Arnall’s brilliant book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change, is such a welcome arrival to the field." - Postmodern Culture

"[A] timely book . . . This book will be especially appreciated by readers with an already solid understanding of Fanonian thought. It is an important contribution to Fanon studies, particularly relevant in the contemporary context of Black Lives Matter and other socio-political resistance movements across the world." - EuropeNow

"Subterranean Fanon is a concise, yet broad overview of Frantz Fanon’s work . . . [It] is one of the most extensive overviews of commentaries on Fanon’s work to date, critically engaging with arguments from Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson, Ato Sekyi-Out, Nigel Gibson to Achille Mbembe and Lewis Gordon. . . The questions raised by Subterranean Fanon are important and should be engaged with by all those who are seeking to understand Fanon today." - Marx and Philosophy Review of Books