Fanon at 100: revolutionary afterlives
December 5-6th 2025
Institute for Languages Cultures and Societies, Senate House London
Deadline for abstracts: 17 February 2025
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frantz Fanon, in Fort-de-France, Martinique. In his short lifetime Fanon authored a series of intense and polemical works that together form a devastating critique of colonialism, and constitute a cornerstone of contemporary postcolonial thought. As a practicing psychiatrist, his insights into race, racism, and interracial desire remain urgent; as a member of the FLN in Algeria, and an advocate of armed struggle against colonialism, he continues to disturb and inspire. Few ‘francophone’ thinkers can be said to have had such an influence in philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies beyond the French-speaking world. None could be said to have had anything like his political impact, having been read by revolutionaries from the African National Congress to the Palestinian fedayeen, and from the Black Panthers to the Irish republican movement. In the current moment, his insights into how the settler has brought the native into existence, and on the inherent violence of this encounter, have particular resonance and urgency. And yet Fanon’s legacy remains contested, by feminist and queer scholars among others; his (mis)reading of Mayotte Capécia, his remarks on what the ‘woman of colour’ wants, and his notorious dismissal of homosexuality in Martinique, are invoked as evidence of his blind spots and prejudices. More recently, he has been widely quoted in the context of Black Lives Matter and Palestine; but he has also been invoked by the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, to support his calls for depopulating Europe of non-white immigrant “occupiers”. In short, Fanon’s legacy and influence ‘outsizes his modest output as a writer’ (Drabinski), leading Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to describe Fanon’s function as a sort of Rorschach test—we see much more in Fanon than is in the text.
This conference seeks to interrogate the legacies of Fanon’s thought, in a broad, critical, intersectional and interdisciplinary perspective. Papers devoted explicitly to Fanon are welcome, as are contributions that interrogate any aspect of francophone postcolonial studies through the prism of Fanonian ideas. Possible topics below; these are indicative rather than exhaustive. Proposals for full panels are welcome.
• Revolution, resistance, radical thought
• Independence, liberation
• Decolonisation
• Settlers and natives
• Europe as creation of the Third World
• The nation and the idea of ‘national culture’
• Race and assimilation
• The lactification complex
• Racial desire and disgust
• Violence, armed struggle, sacrifice
• Gender
• Mind and body
• The colonial city
• Commitment and engagement
• Veiling and unveiling
• Fanon as reader (Lacan; Capécia; Mannoni; Sartre)
• Readers of Fanon (Bhabha; Said; Hall; Condé)
• Precursors and heirs
• Fanon’s language
• Fanon and the Medical Humanities
• Biography, biographies, biographers
• Fanon in fiction, film, graphic novel
• Translation, mistranslation, translators
• Phenomenology, Marxism, psychoanalysis
• Contexts of reception: Africa; Antilles; Europe
• Global Fanon
• Fanon as icon
The conference will take place in person, December 5-6th 2025 in the Institute for Languages Cultures and Societies, Senate House, London. Please send abstracts to: sfpsannualconference@gmail.com
