Fanon’s Ship’s Journals: The Logbook of Decolonisation

This essay adopts the image of the ship’s logbook (“journal de bord”) to reinterpret anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s writings from a blue humanities perspective. This image was important to Fanon, as he wrote a form of logbook in the summer of 1960 during a trip to Mali. In 1953, the image of the ship’s logbook was adopted by Fanon for his weekly ward journal during his work at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria. The logbook can be seen as an important formal and stylistic choice that resonates across Fanon’s oeuvre. Fanon redefines the “journal de bord” as a decolonising genre, countering the central role of these textual forms in the economics of colonialism and the slave trade. This essay hence reimagines and resituates Fanon’s work in the tradition of logbook writing while at the same time reconsidering the logbook within the history of a colonial and capitalist modernity.