Schedule

Opening Keynote: Munira Khayyat (NYU Abu Dhabi)

9:00 - 9:30am (Social Science Matrix)

“Resistant Ecologies: Lessons from South Lebanon”

Panel: Humanism and Universality after Decolonization

2:00pm - 3:15pm (Social Science Matrix)

Panel Participants: Veronica Korman, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer; Dion Nataraja, UC Berkeley; Jonathan Marty, UC Berkeley; Suleiman Hodali, UCLA

Frantz Fanon tarries with the question of universality throughout his oeuvre. He underlines its double, opposing characteristics: it bears liberatory potential, but at the same time, it risks flattening the particularities of the colonial subject. By recuperating concepts like universality and humanism on radically anti-colonial terms, Fanon works against the consolidating political and epistemological hegemony of the Empire. He demonstrates this gesture, for example, in his translation of Hegelian concepts in Black Skin, White Masks, followed by a further elaboration in A Dying Colonialism and Wretched of the Earth. This conference theme aims to provide a space for both sustained, theoretically-oriented readings of Fanon’s text, as well as works which focus on the pragmatic potential of engagement with Fanon’s perspective of universality. Engagement with these themes are essential, as they underlie many other ideas within the Fanonian framework—humanism, theory of the Subject, conception of history, and more. For this session, topics may include, but are not limited to: 

  • Fanon’s theorization of new humanism

  • Fanon’s engagement, critique, and transformation of universal categories inherited from European thinkers

  • The potential and problematics of universal categories in contemporary decolonial projects

  • The productive tension between Fanon’s conception of Blackness with his anticolonial humanism

Panel: Lived Experiences of Blackness

9:45am - 11:15am (Social Science Matrix)

Panel Participants: Jaleel Mashaul Plummer, UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco; Coryna Ogunseitan, UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco; Russell Ladson, UC Berkeley; Charlie Pollard-Durodola, UC Berkeley

Throughout his life, Fanon struggled with understanding how Blackness existed in the world, and how racism, and racial violence, impinged on the psyches and material conditions of the colonized Other. He paid particularly close attention to, for example, the contingency of Blackness—in terms of who claimed and didn't claim Blackness, and how experiences of Blackness varied based on geographic and colonial situation—as discussed in his 1955 essay “West Indians and Africans.” His 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks also considered—although to a much more limited and deeply flawed extent—how Blackness was lived differently along lines of gender. Throughout his texts, Fanon grappled with the tension between Blackness as overdetermined from the outside and Black diasporic resistances to this overdetermination. His body of work demonstrates an abiding concern with how Black people think of, move through, and make the world.

This conference theme invites proposals that think with Fanon’s notions of Blackness. We encourage proposals that engage, critique and stretch Fanon’s work to think through the multiple ways that Blackness shapes our contemporary world, and the role Blackness may or may not play in liberation projects.. Examples of themes that proposals might explore include but are not limited to the following:

  • Theorizing from Fanon’s conception of Blackness, its potential, and limitations 

  • Exploring the possibilities and limits of Fanon’s thought to make sense of the lived experiences and psychic realities of Blackness

  • Exploring the potential and limitations of Fanon’s theories of Blackness as a source of liberation in the present

  • Any other proposals that critically engage with Fanon’s conception of Blackness and its applicability to the present or historical moments

  • Engagements with Fanon that explicitly takes up the intersection of Blackness, gender, and sexuality

  • Black lived experiences of the postcolonial world

Lunch: [TBD]

1:00pm - 2:00pm (Social Science Matrix)

Lunch will be provided for registered conference attendees and participants.

Panel: Postcolonial, Anticolonial, and Decolonial Theory in Conversation

11:30am - 12:45pm (Social Science Matrix)

Panel Participants: Ki’Amber Thompson, UC Santa Cruz; Leo Dunsker, UC Berkeley; Gwendalynn Roebke, University of Pennsylvania; Haider Shahbaz, UCLA; Aron Macal Montenegro, UC Irvine

The influences of Frantz Fanon’s works can be found across many fields, and form part of the foundations of scholarship that come from the related, yet distinct, genealogical traditions of postcolonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial theory. This open-ended round table session invites proposals from scholars who locate their work within these intellectual traditions in order to foster critical conversations about a variety of contemporary questions, including but not limited to:

  1. Where can we locate the influences of Fanon’s ideas within these various traditions of thought?

  2. Do these various traditions entail meaningful distinctions, and what are their political stakes, affordances, and limitations for liberatory theory and praxis?

  3. How can we speak across boundaries to locate possible points of convergence between these theoretical traditions?

  4. Geographically and disciplinarily, where do these scholarly traditions originate and travel, and what does this reveal about the planetary “afterlives” of Fanon’s thought?

This session is intended to highlight the political stakes of working within, across, and beyond these schools, and welcomes approaches that speak to the porous boundaries between each. Panel participants are encouraged to prepare brief remarks about their own theoretical commitments to any/multiple of these theoretical categories, but the session will primarily feature dialogue between participants facilitated by a moderator.

Keynote: Dr. Sophia Azeb (UC Santa Cruz)

Black Studies and Relation: Frantz Fanon’s Affective Geographies of Liberation

3:30pm - 4:30pm, followed by social

Dr. Sophia Azeb, Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, will provide closing remarks.