Opinion of Frantz Fanon?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Deinstitutionalization certainly didn't go well in the US, although that's more Ken Kesey and Jack Nicholson's fault than Fanon's. Other than that, which is the main thing I know him for, he seems like a pretty typical early postcolonial theorist with the unpleasant proto-"cultural turn" whiff that often implies. Didn't vote.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

FF. The Wretched of the Earth is an excellent analysis of anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial nationhood. A personal favorite passage of his:

“Of course if we choose to use a language comprehensible only to law and economics graduates it will be easy to prove that the masses need to have their life run for them. But if we speak in plain language, if we are not obsessed with a perverse determination to confuse the issues and exclude the people, then it will be clear that the masses comprehend all the finer points and every artifice.... Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language’s endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess.... You can explain everything to the people provided you really want them to understand.”

This is a breath of fresh air compared to, say, Paulo Freire's insistence that the people he was concerned with liberating already understood everything he wrote and leftist educators who suggested otherwise were being concern trolls.