Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day
Friday 23 May 2025, Buckingham House, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 10am-5pm
Colonial toxicity and ecologies of empire
Keynote speakers:
Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Aedín Ní Loingsigh (University of Stirling)
The 2025 SFPS annual postgraduate study day provides an opportunity to present research emerging at the intersection of Francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. In the recent work of scholars and thinkers including Malcom Ferdinand and Françoise Vergès, new and challenging contributions to debates about decolonial and intersectional ecologies are emerging in the French-speaking world. These interventions extend also to the interconnections of postcolonial studies with the history and philosophy of science, evident for instance in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher’s history of climate change, Les révoltes du ciel (2022), which includes discussion of nineteenth-century Algeria.
These debates are complemented by the creative outputs of authors, filmmakers and artists working in French and other languages in a broad range of locations. Their works span the Francosphere, from the writings of the activist Innu poet Joséphine Bacon in Quebec to the Saharan “furigraphies” of the Tuareg poet Hawad. They include other works such as Yamen Manai’s L’amas ardent (2017), a literary response to intersecting ecological and political crises in the Maghreb.
Such creative work evokes specific environmental crises – such as the Chlordecone scandal in Martinique (represented in Tropiques Toxiques: le scandale du chlordécone, a graphic account by Jessica Oublié) – but also engages in broader debates about the toxic and radioactive afterlives of empire, evident notably in reflections on the plantationocene. At the same time, as the growing interest in a “green Negritude” reveals, there is a need to challenge presentism and to analyse the proto-ecological sensibilities or earlier Francophone intellectual movements.
The participation fee is £10, and an optional membership registration fee of £20 into SFPS. Tea/coffee and lunch will be provided.
Organising Committee:
Hugo Azerad; Tobias Barnett; Doyle Calhoun; Leyla Chery; Charles Forsdick; Sura Qadiri; Weibing Ni
Please find the CPF at this link
SFPS 2025 Annual Conference
Fanon at 100: revolutionary afterlives
December 5-6th 2025
Institute for Languages Cultures and Societies, Senate House London
ILCS, Senate House, Malet Street, London
SFPS Annual Conference 2025: Fanon at 100, Revolutionary Afterlives
Thursday 4th December 4pm: film screening of Les Chroniques de Blida (2024)
Dir. Abdenour Zahzah
Friday 5th December & Saturday 6th December 2025: annual conference
DAY 1 – Friday 5 December 2025
8.45: Registration, Coffee/Tea
9.15-10.15: Keynote 1 – The Kate Marsh Memorial Lecture: Sinan Richards (University College Cork), ‘”Une atmosphère de fin du monde”: Fanon on the trigger of disenclosure’. Chair: Laura Kennedy.
10.30-12: Parallel Sessions (1)
Panel 1A: Applying Fanon (Chair: Sonia Lamrani) |
Panel 1B: Translations, prefaces, readings (Chair: ) |
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1 |
Helen McKelvey (University of Glasgow), ‘Black skin, white habits: Whitewashing Marie Kaïsale’ |
1 |
Nick Harrison (Kings College London), ‘Tout le reste est littérature’ |
2 |
Weibing Ni (University of Cambridge), ‘A Fanonian Reading of Counter-Violence: Violent Resistance by Racialised Others in the Works of Albert Camus and William Faulkner’ |
2 |
Felisa Vergara Reynolds (University of Illinois), ‘Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre : Or, Empire’s Eclipse’ |
3 |
Kate Mackenzie (University of St Andrews), ‘Témoignages d’enfants: Fanon in and through the child’s gaze’ |
3 |
Jacqueline Couti (Rice University), ‘Fanon, lecteur de l’entre-deux : entre lectures locale et globale’ |
Panel 1C: Psychiatry, trauma, healing (Chair: Dónal Hassett) |
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1 |
Fadila Yahou (Université Paris 1 Sorbonne), ‘Frantz Fanon, un psychiatre dans |
2 |
Aedín Ní Loingsigh (University of Stirling), ‘Growing Collectively with Fanon’ |
3 |
Eftihia Mihelakis and Lucille Toth (Brandon University; Ohio State University-Newark), ‘Frantz Fanon and Diasporic Sociogeny: Theorizing Contemporary Narratives of Transgenerational Trauma’ |
12-13.30: AGM and Lunch Break (meeting room tbc)
13.30-15.15: Parallel Sessions (2)
Panel 2A: Philosophy, theory, ethics (Chair: Mary Gallagher) |
Panel 2B: Fanon, Decoloniality, and the Resistance Frameworks of Visual Culture (Chair: Adlai Murdoch) |
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1 |
Philippe Le Goff (University of Warwick), ‘Fanon, humanism and the ‘zone de non-être’’ |
1 |
Kris F. Sealey (Penn State), ‘Making Memory Anew: Caribbean Poetics and Symbolic Visuality in Brand and Walcott’ |
2 |
David Ventura (Newcastle University), ‘Refiguring the Ambivalence of Refusal with Fanon and Glissant’ |
2 |
Adlai Murdoch (Penn State), ‘Antillean Antinomies of Opposition and Decoloniality: Combatting Napoleon and Decolonial Resistance avant la lettre’ |
3 |
Godesulloh Joshua Bawa (Cornell University), ‘An Anti-Theorist Reading of Frantz Fanon: Agency, Dignity and A Challenge to How We Think About Ethics’ |
3 |
Anjali Prabhu (UCLA), ‘Frantz Fanon, Decolonization, and Cinema: “I Wait for Me” or Mati Diop’s Aesthetics of Movement’ |
4 |
Maya Boutaghou (University of Virginia), ‘Frantz Fanon et la philosophie du langage’ |
4 |
Diaa Alsersawi (UCLA), ‘Rethinking Fanon’s Legacy in Third Cinema: A Study of Elia Suleiman’s Film Work’ |
Panel 2C: Biographies; the personal (Chair: Nick Harrison) |
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1 |
Keithley Woolward (Columbia University Paris Global Center), ‘Engaging Fanon’s biography from the Caribbean’ |
2 |
Phoebe Braithwaite (Harvard University), ‘The Half-Lives of Frantz Fanon: Fanon and Biography’ |
3 |
Patrick Crowley (University of Galway), ‘Memmi’s ‘La Vie Impossible de Fanon’ and the Constraints of the Biographical Portrait’ |
4 |
Jessica Breakey (University College London), ‘Unpacking Josie Fanon’s Library’ |
15.15-15.45: Coffee break
15.45- 17.30: Parallel Sessions (3)
Panel 3A: Diagnostician of the Colonial Condition: the Legacy of Fanon in Repairing and Reimagining Fractured Lives, Voices, and Environments (Chair: Jennifer Boum Make) |
Panel 3B: Theatre, performance, speech (Chair: ) |
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1 |
Don Joseph (University of Missouri), ‘Colonial Trauma and Fragmented Identities: Reading Nedjma Through Fanonian Psychiatry’ |
1 |
Felicity Bromley-Hall (University of Nottingham), ‘The Love That Makes You Live to the Power of Two: Frantz Fanon, the Playwright’ |
2 |
Katelyn E Knox (Louisiana State University), ‘History’s Static: Aural Insurgency, Tinnitus, and (Post)colonial Politics in Bessora’s Deux bébés et l’addition’ |
2 |
Benjamin Dalton and Andrew Ainscough (Lancaster University), ‘Fanon, the hospital, and performance: imagining anti-racist clinical architecture across Fanon, theatre, and Caryl Churchill’s The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (1990)’ |
3 |
John Walsh (University of Pittsburgh), ‘Seeing Haiti Otherwise: The Documentary, Oppositional Gaze of Arnold Antonin’s Thus Spoke the Sea’ |
3 |
Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths), ‘Fanon’s Grinner-Tricksters in Postcolonial Performance’ |
4 |
Jennifer Boum Make (Georgetown University), ‘Reimagining Care and Relationship to the Medical: The Work of Projet Amazones Across France d’Outre-Mer’ |
4 |
Nicola Lamri (Université polytechnique Hauts-de-France/Università di Bologna), ‘Sur la voie des Damnés : le discours inédit de Fanon devant le Conseil de l’Assemblée mondiale de la jeunesse, Accra 1960’ |
Panel 3C: Violence, Counter-Violence, War (Chair: Patrick Crowley) |
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1 |
Dónal Hassett (Maynooth University), ‘‘The Muslim, in general, was not too troubled by the emotions of the war’: The Influence of the First World War on the Rise of Colonial Psychiatry’ |
2 |
Lou Khalfaoui (University of Leeds), ‘“Modernity by breaking and entering”: the categorization of colonial violence in French Algerian official discourses (1999-2012)’ |
3 |
Kylie Erfani (George Mason University),‘Demystifying Violence in Fanon’s |
4 |
David Murphy (University of Strathclyde), ‘Black Skin, White Hearts: Fanon and the tirailleurs sénégalais’ |
17.30-18.30: Keynote 2 – The Dorothy Blair Memorial Lecture: Professor Kathryn Batchelor (University College London), ‘Decoloniality and/versus Postcolonialism: Fanon’s Place’. Chair: Maeve McCusker.
18.30-19.30: Vin d’honneur, generously sponsored by Liverpool University Press (tbc)
20.00: Conference Dinner (at delegates’ expense)
DAY 2 – Saturday 6th December 2025
9:00-10:45 Parallel Sessions (4)
Panel 4A: Queer and Trans Approaches to Fanon (Chair: ) |
Panel 4B: Fanon in dialogue (Chair: ) |
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1 |
Beshouy Botros (Yale University), ‘Frantz Fanon, Algerian Medical Encounters, and the Colonial History of the Gender Clinic’ |
1 |
Hanna Bechiche (University of Cambridge), ’For a Return to “the Dark Night”: Tahar Djaout and the Violence of Heliocentrism’ |
2 |
Doyle Calhoun (University of Cambridge), ‘Negritude in “Homosexual Terrain”: Fanon and Ouologuem read Senghor’ |
2 |
Jihad Azahrai (Columbia University), ‘Echoes of Fanon: Intergenerational Tensions and Colonial Memory in La Discrétion’ |
3 |
Marshall L. Smith (Swarthmore College), ‘Remapping Atmospheres of Uncertainty: Fanon and the Plantation Americas’
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3 |
Ekua Agha (independent scholar), ‘In Praise of Popular Memory: Frantz Fanon’s influence on Francophone African Literature and Cinema’
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4 |
Elisa Reato (Paris, Nanterre) ‘Fanon lecteur de Sartre : décoloniser le regard’ |
Panel 4C: Audio and Visual Fanon (Chair: ) |
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1 |
Roxanna Curto (University of Iowa), ‘Fanon’s Thoughts on the Radio in Algeria’ |
2 |
Erin K. Twohig (Georgetown University), ‘Sport, Liberation, and Violence: a Fanonian reading of Un maillot pour l’Algérie’ |
3 |
Charles Forsdick (University of Cambridge), ‘Fanon and the graphic novel’ |
4 |
John Drabinski (University of Maryland), ‘Fanon, Music, and Racial Time’ |
10:45-11:15: Coffee Break
11:15-13.00: Parallel Sessions (5)
Panel 5A: Decolonial Fanon (Chair: Sinan Richards) |
Panel 5B: Fanon et Sartre en conversation (Chair: Cristina Stoianovici) |
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1 |
Fraser McQueen (University of Bristol), ‘Fanon, Decolonial Thought, and the French Far Right: Historical Continuities’ |
1 |
Cristina Stoianovici (Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne), ‘Fanon lecteur de la Critique de la Raison dialectique de Sartre’. |
2 |
Sonia Lamrani (University of Boumerdes), ‘Diverging Approaches to Decoloniality in the Writings of Fanon, Memmi, and Bennabi’ |
2 |
Louise Mai (Sorbonne Université), ‘Situation et sociogenèse : penser et écrire le trouble psychique avec Fanon et Sartre’ |
3 |
Rehnuma Sazzad (School of Advanced Study), ‘Frantz Fanon: Revolution, Resistance, and Radical Humanism’ |
3 |
Mickaëlle Provost (Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne), ‘Oppression-liberté : penser les résistances politiques avec Frantz Fanon’ |
4 |
Luiza Duarte Caetano (University of Michigan), ‘Decolonization’s Futures through Revolutionary Pasts: Reading Fanon through Louise Michel’ |
4 |
Maririta Guerbo (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), ‘Les Damnés de la terre entre sociétés froides et sociétés chaudes : Fanon lecteur de Sartre et de Lévi-Strauss’ |
Panel 5C: The Nation/national culture (Chair: David Murphy) |
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1 |
John Lancaster (University of Central Florida), ‘Marianne Unveiled: Negotiating Beur Identity in 1980s France within the MRAP’s Publication Différences’ |
2 |
Valerie K. Orlando (University of Maryland), ‘The New Man and the Poetics of a Nation, 1950-1979: Fanon’s Legacy Written into the Algerian New Novel’ |
3 |
Yan Bylon (Université de Poitiers), ‘L’écriture de l’intellectuel colonisé, son scandale et le rapport à la culture nationale’ |
4 |
Suleikha Sutter (University of California), ‘Escaping the Zone of Non-Being: Recognition and Belonging in the Color-Blind state’ |
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.45: Parallel Sessions (6)
Panel 6A: Beyond the Human: Race, Landscapes and Animal Forms (Chair: Jane Hiddleston) |
Panel 6B: Fanon sans frontières: music, history, and the future (Chair: Martin Munro) |
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1 |
Cécile Bishop (University of Oxford), ‘The Becoming-Insect of Frantz Fanon: Blackness, Form, and Lived Experience’ |
1 |
Mehdi Chalmers (Florida State University), ‘Calling Fanon, Response Coursil: Jacques Coursil’s Jazz Oratorio, Homage and dialogue with Frantz Fanon’ |
2 |
Jane Hiddleston (University of Oxford), ‘Mask or Camouflage? Frantz Fanon, Suzanne Césaire, and Daniel Maximin on Decolonial Ecology’ |
2 |
Martin Munro (Florida State University), ‘MacFanon’ |
3 |
Abigail E. Celis (Université de Montréal), ‘Decolonial Forgetting in Abdessamad El Montassir’s Trab’ssahl’ |
3 |
Beya Behi (Florida State University), ‘The New Hu(man): politics of Indigenous Futurism’ |
4 |
Jackqueline Frost (University of London Institute in Paris), ‘La désintégration atomique: Fanon and Nuclear Imperialism’ |
4 |
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Panel 6C: International Fanon? (Chair: Kathryn Batchelor) |
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1 |
Boulou Ebanda de B’beri (University of Ottawa), ‘Fanonian Global Interventions before Globalisation: A Model of Transgeographical Practice of Identity’ |
2 |
Christ-Levy Leboba (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia), ‘Les “Damnés Noirs” au sein de la République argentine : Racisme institutionnel durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’ |
3 |
Cid V. Brunet and Ariane Hanemaayer (University of British Columbia/Brandon University), ‘Barnardo’s “littlest pilgrims” build a nation: Critical and effective history meets creative historical nonfiction’ |
4 |
Mary Gallagher (University College Dublin), ‘Retroactive Illumination: Fanon’s Damnés de la terre and the self-positioning of an Irish writer’s 1909 novel on Belgian Congo atrocities’ |
15.45-16.15: Coffee Break
16.15-17.15: Author meets critics: Azzedine Haddour meets Muriam Davis, Patrick Crowley, Jane Hiddleston, Sinan Richards, to mark the publication of Frantz Fanon, Gender, Torture and the Biopolitics of Colonialism (Pluto, 2025).
Chair: Charles Forsdick.
17:30-18:30: Keynote 3: Muriam Davis (UC Santa Cruz), ‘Fanon between Decolonization and Decoloniality: An Algerian Analysis’. Chair: Patrick Crowley
18:30: Conference Close