Martinique islander by birth and a psychiatrist by training, Franz Fanon is better known as a pan-African revolutionary ideologue. His treatises on colonialism call for revolutionary confrontation with malignant colonial regimes, where necessary on the battlefield, and, more important, for the eradication of the most invidious form of colonialism, namely, colonial mentality. Fanon holds that this mentality prevents the African and the black person everywhere even from being aware of the seriousness of the social and personal deprivations of his or her colonized status. Fanon found his voice when he worked for the Algerian revolutionaries during the Algerian War of Independence against the French. Not only did he become deeply involved in the Algerian struggle, he also emerged as its principal ideologue and formulated his anticolonial writings from the Algerian experience.
Richard Philcox is the distinguished translator of many works by Caribbean writer Maryse Conde.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of Afro-American Studies, and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. In 1997 he was listed among Time magazine's '25 Most Influential Americans'. Gates' publications
include Figures in Black (OUP, 1987), The Signifying Monkey (OUP, 1988), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997), Wonders of the African World (Knopf, 1999), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Perseus, 1999), and The African American
Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (Perseus, 2000). One of the world's most prominent and influential figures in the fields of postcolonial studies and cultural theory, Homi K. Bhabha is Professor of English at Harvard University.
Sartre is the dominant figure in post-war French intellectual life. A graduate of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure with an agregation in philosophy, Sartre has been a major figure on the literary and philosophical scenes since the late 1930s. Widely known as an atheistic proponent of existentialism, he emphasized the priority of existence over preconceived essences and the importance of human freedom. In his first and best novel, Nausea (1938), Sartre contrasted the fluidity of human consciousness with the apparent solidity of external reality and satirized the hypocrisies and pretensions of bourgeois idealism. Sartre's theater is also highly ideological, emphasizing the importance of personal freedom and the commitment of the individual to social and political goals. His first play, The Flies (1943), was produced during the German occupation, despite its underlying message of defiance. One of his most popular plays is the one-act No Exit (1944), in which the traditional theological concept of hell is redefined in existentialist terms. In Red Gloves (Les Mains Sales) (1948), Sartre examines the pragmatic implications of the individual involved in political action through the mechanism of the Communist party and a changing historical situation. His highly readable autobiography, The Words (1964), tells of his childhood in an idealistic bourgeois Protestant family and of his subsequent rejection of his upbringing. Sartre has also made significant contributions to literary criticism in his 10-volume Situations (1947--72) and in works on Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and refused it, saying that he always declined official honors.