“The violence which presided over the arrangement of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of indigenous social forms, demolished without restriction the reference systems of the economy, the modes of appearance, of dress, will be claimed and assumed by the colonized at the moment when, deciding to be history in action, the colonized mass will rush into the forbidden cities. Blowing up the colonial world is now a very clear action image, very understandable and can be taken up by each of the individuals constituting the colonized people. Frantz Fanon.

Published in 1961, at a time when colonial violence was unleashed with the war in Algeria, seized many times when it was published by Éditions François Maspero, the book Les Damnés de la terre , prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre, has experienced an exceptional fate. It served — and still serves today — as an inspiration and reference for generations of anti-colonialist activists. His analysis of the trauma of the colonized within the framework of the colonial system and his utopian project of a revolutionary Third World carrying a "new man" remain a great classic of Third Worldism, the capital work and the political testament of Frantz Fanon. . In this new edition, the preface by Alice Cherki, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, author of Portrait de Frantz Fanon (Seuil, 2000), and the afterword by Mohammed Harbi, early fighter for the liberation of his country and historian of the Contemporary Algeria, author of A Standing Life. Political Memoirs 1945-1962 (La Découverte, 2001), restore the contemporary importance of the thought of Frantz Fanon.