Wretched of the Earth takes its title from the opening line of "The Internationale," the anthem of the international workers' movement, which in French calls on the damnés de la terre, the wretched of the earth, to arise. Frantz Fanon wrote the book in a matter of months in 1961 while dying of leukemia, and published it as he served the Algerian Revolution. In France the authorities seized copies as seditious. It became one of the most influential books of the anticolonial era, read by liberation movements across Africa, by the Black Panther Party in the United States, by Steve Biko in South Africa, and by revolutionaries across Asia and Latin America. This print reimagines its cover for a new generation of readers.

By the wretched of the earth, Fanon meant the colonized masses at the bottom of the colonial world. These were above all the peasants of the countryside, and the dispossessed who had been driven off the land into the shantytowns at the edges of colonial cities, people with no stake in the colonial order. Orthodox Marxism looked to the industrial working class as the revolutionary force. Fanon argued that in the colonies the small urban working class and the educated elite were often relatively privileged and tempted toward compromise. It was the wretched, those with nothing to lose, who carried the deepest revolutionary potential.

Fanon described the colonial world as a world cut in two, divided between the settlers' town and the town of the colonized. He saw decolonization as the complete transformation of that world, not a change of flags. He warned that a national bourgeoisie might take the colonizers' place without changing the system, leaving the masses as poor as before, and he insisted that liberation must be carried out by and for the wretched themselves. His question still applies everywhere: who is cast out by the present order, and what world could they build if they rose to take their future into their own hands?

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*