Frantz Fanon and the visual

Recent research in Frantz Fanon’s archives has allowed us to assemble a corpus of correspondence, unpublished plays and essays. However, it has also highlighted the lack of photographs retrieved during these undertakings. Artists have addressed this issue by offering representations of the Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist through literature, graphic novels and films. Absent from Fanonian studies is a critical attention to his representations in bande dessinée [‘comic book’]. Drawing upon Hugo Pratt’s (re)definition of the genre through ‘littérature dessinée’ [‘graphic literature’], this article studies Frédéric Ciriez and Romain Lamy’s graphic novel Frantz Fanon (2020) to show the intersection between literature and drawing in the genre of biography. It studies the ways in which the authors elaborate an intermedial format through the entanglement of documentation, fiction and media. Ultimately, this contribution argues that Ciriez and Lamy devise a liana-like biography to mediate texts and images through a multi-relational approach to Fanon’s life and thought. This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .