Fanon at 100, or the Pragmatics of Freedom: Aesthetics, Care, Psychoanalysis, and Revolution

PUBLIC EVENT | June 24, 2024 | 10.00 - 19.00 | Universiteit van Amsterdam

10.00 - 11.45 | P.C. Hoofthuis 0.05

12.55 - 19.00 | P.C. Hoofthuis 1.05

Many are the events worldwide to commemorate the centennial of Fanon's birth in 2025 (e.g. Caribbean Philosophical Association in Martinique as a large-scale conference this summer; University of London's SFPS conference in November; smaller events already taking place throughout the Netherlands, with notably screenings of films and discussions in May 2025 with UvA Decolonial Futures Fellow Ahmed Memon, Tilburg Law School 2025 Witteveen Memorial Fellow Anamika Misra, and Black Archives Researcher Phaedra Haringsma. Jean-Claude Barny (2025) has just made a new film, which will premièred in the Netherlands in early July, as well as Abdenour Zahzah’s 2024 film, which won an award at the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) this past year, complementing the already now canonical films by Isaac Julien (1995) or by Göran Olsson (2014).

Confirmed keynote speakers are: Norman Ajari, Layal Ftouni, David Theo Goldberg, Monique Roelofs, and Rehnuma Sazzad, moderated by Wayne Modest, organized by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Sanjukta Sunderason.

For any questions, please contact: a.benedicty@uva.nl Seats are limited, so please come early.

More on the event

For our part, our inquiry for this current small-scale event, is the following:

How to put the more psychoanalytical legacies of Fanonian thought into conversation with concrete activist work? How might we articulate the urgencies of Fanonian thought in scholarship, pedagogy, and activism? What are the stakes of teaching Fanon today?

Beyond the facile and albeit seductive romanticization of Fanon's writing and life especially in the 'cultural industry,' why is it that Fanonian thought remains overwhelmingly central to the work of so many scholars from quite varying, even schismic, affective relationships to the de/post/colonial? How might we account for these quite divergent intellectual legacies? As such, these curated panels, are interested in creating plenary conversations between and among the legacies of his work, among scholars in the political, the literary, the philosophical, and the psychoanalytical.

For any questions about the event: a.benedicty@uva.nl

Program

PROGRAM (subject to change, and full final program to be posted a few days before event)

10.00 – 11.45 (P.C. Hoofthuis 0.05)

Pedagogies of Fanonian thought: In conversation with Norman Ajari,

with a presentation specifically prepared for this session by Michael Thomas

Session especially for students enrolled for NICA credits. Please email a.benedicty@uva.nl to enroll.

11.45 – 12.55 lunch break.

12.55 – 14.30 (P.C. Hoofthuis 1.05)

Aesthetics, pessimisms, and Fanonian thought

14.30 – 14.45 break

14.45 – 16.15 (P.C. Hoofthuis 1.05)

Fanon and political action

16.15 – 16.45 break

16.45 – 19.00

Keynote panel, with intro and thanks

About the Participants

Mehdi AIT OUKHZAME is a PhD researcher at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia, currently doing a research stay at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Mehdi’s PhD project develops the idea of ‘Black and queer of colour child’s standpoint’ as an optic for the critique of heteronormativity and anti-Blackness in self-life-narratives written by Afro-diasporic Black and queer of colour authors. Prior to starting his PhD, Mehdi received a RMA in Gender Studies at Utrecht University.

Dr. Norman AJARI is lecturer in Francophone Black studies and an honorary member of the department of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is an Executive Board member at the Frantz Fanon Foundation. His books include Dignity or Death (Polity, 2023), Darkening Blackness (Polity, 2024), and Afro-Decolonial Manifesto (Seagull, 2025).

Alessandra BENEDICTY-KOKKEN was Research Associate working as a co-editor with Wonu Veys and Josep Almudéver Chanzà on the output emerging from the Un/Engendering research speculations. She is assistant professor at University of Amsterdam affiliated with Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis.

She was formerly Research Coordinator and Senior Researcher for the Research Center of Material Culture, superbly honoured to have worked at RCMC, and continues an affiliation with the City College of New York's Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, fondly referred to as "CWE".

Jana Cattien is Assistant Professor in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She works on feminist philosophy, critical race and postcolonial theory, with a particular focus on the intersections of psychic and political life. Recent work has appeared in Political Theory, Signs, Feminist Theory, and Theory & Event.

Marija Cetinić works as Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, coordinates the MA Comparative Literature, and is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity and runs the seminar series We Have Never Had Sex. At Sandberg Institute, she teaches in the MA Critical Studies. At Perdu, center for poetry and experiment, she is a member of the programming collective. She co-organizes the (Trans--) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School. Her current research is on negativity and feminization.

Mano DELEA is a Lecturer in Modern and Dutch History at the University of Amsterdam. He previously was a Lecturer in American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, a Lecturer in Political - and Economic History at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a Visiting Lecturer in Transatlantic Studies at Utrecht University. He was Program Director of the Black Europe Summer School (2014-2021) in Amsterdam, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (spring 2024). The topics of his published works are slavery and its legacy, Pan-Africanism, colonialism, imperialism, economic development and ethnic relations. His PhD research examined the transformations and knowledge production of Pan-Africanism. He wrote several articles, including on Edward W. Blyden and Otto and Hermina Huiswoud and co-wrote a report commissioned by the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) regarding the 1862 Dutch parliamentary debate on the abolition of slavery, which was presented to the Dutch House of Representatives in 2022. His first monograph Pan-Africanism: Visions, Initiatives, and Transformation was published by Lexington Books in 2024.

Layal FTOUNI is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently working on a research project on the 'reproduction of life', both human and environmental, in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation in the settler colonial context of Palestine. She received the Dutch Research Council VENI grant to support this project. Her publications and areas of research interests are, broadly construed, at the intersection of critical theory, gender studies, Palestine studies, political theory and critiques of the human/ human rights. As well as her educational and research work, Layal is also a founding member of Dutch Scholars for Palestine, a network of educational workers across Dutch Universities committed to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination. She is on the Editorial Board of Lateral, a peer-review open-access journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Before joining Utrecht University, she lectured at SOAS, University of London, and earned her PhD from the University of Westminster.

Francio GUADELOUPE has been a tenured faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) since 2013, where he integrates public anthropology with a passion for teaching and conducting ethnographic research. In June 2024, he was appointed Professor by Special Appointment of Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the UvA. In addition to his academic role, Guadeloupe is a senior research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW). He previously served as President of the University of St. Martin (USM) for four years, during which the institution secured international accreditation for its associate degree programs in Hospitality and Business. His leadership also fostered collaboration with the University of the U.S. Virgin Islands, enabling USM to offer internationally accredited joint Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Educational Sciences and Business Administration.

David Theo GOLDBERG is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine. Directed the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute from 2000-2022. Goldberg’s work ranges over issues of social, political, and critical theory, the impact of technology on human futures, digital technology, and race and racism. His numerous books include The War on Critical Race Theory (Polity, 2023); Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (Polity, 2021); Between Humanities and the Digital (with Patrik Svensson, MIT, 2015); Are We All Postracial Yet? (Polity, 2015); Sites of Race (with Susan Searls Giroux, Polity, 2014); and The Future of Thinking (with Cathy Davidson, MIT, 2011). He served as the Executive Director of the MacArthur-sponsored UCHRI Research Hub in Digital Media and Learning at UC Irvine, an on-site and virtual research facility designed to promote field-building in the area.

Wigbertson Julian ISENIA (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in Cultural Analysis and holding a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, their interdisciplinary work merges ethnography and archival research to explore Caribbean identities, postcolonial conditions, and queer subjectivities, particularly in Curaçao. Their scholarship interrogates the entanglements of gender, sexuality, and (post)colonialism through cultural texts, archives, and performances. Isenia has published in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Feminist Review, Theaterkrant, and Small Axe. They have also contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe, and forthcoming anthologies with Oxford University Press.

mr. Dr. Nawal MUSTAFA an Assistant Professor in Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Indigenous Studies within the Cultural Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of law, colonialism, slavery, and the regulation of intimacy. mr. Dr. Mustafa completed her PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, focusing on migration and the historical regulation of interracialised intimacy in the UK following World War II. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher examining the legal history of slavery within the Dutch empire. Next to her academic roles, mr. dr. Mustafa also serves as a strategic legal advisor at PILP, a human rights law firm and NGO based in Amsterdam

Wayne MODEST is Director of Content of Wereldmuseum, with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.

Grâce NDJAKO is a philosopher, author and translator. She studied Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the Sorbonne in Paris.

She writes for various Dutch publications such as Dipsaus Podcast, de Nederlandse Boekengids, Hard//Hoofd, de Witte Raaf and De Internet Gids.

She translated Aimé Césaire’s ‘Discours sur le colonialisme’ and the poems of Nele Marian from French to Dutch. She is currently working on her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Kwame NIMAKO is the founder and director of the Black Europe Summer School (BESS) based in Amsterdam since 2007 (www.blackeurope.org). He holds degrees in sociology and a PhD in economics from the University of Amsterdam where he also taught International Relations in the Department of Political Sciences (1992-2013) and Race and Ethnic Relations at the Centre for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) (1986- 1991). He held visiting professor positions in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (Spring 2018 and 2012-2015) and at the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (2011) and has also given lectures at universities, conferences and organizations in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and Sweden. Dr. Nimako has consulted with several private and public institutions including the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Municipal Council, and the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs. He was the Principal Research Consultant for Focus Consultancy Ltd (UK) (1996-1997) on the Migrants in Europe Project commissioned by the General-Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States (in Brussels). He is the author or co-author of more than thirty books, reports and guidebooks, on economic development, ethnic relations, social policy, urban renewal, and migration. His most recent book is The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (with Glenn Willemsen) (London, Pluto Press, 2011). Among his recent book chapters and articles are: Remembrance, Commemoration, and Apologies: The Dutch Context and Implications for Other European Nations Compendium: Journal of Comparative Studies (2024);‘Multiculturalism vs Multiculturalism in the Dutch Material Real World’; In: Wayne Modest and Wendeline Flores (eds), Our Colonial Inheritance (Lannoo, Wereld Museum, Amsterdam, 2024); ‘The Roads, the Belt, and the contemporary international political-economic system’; In: The Belt and Road Initiative in Asia, Africa, and Europe (Routledge 2023); Editors, David Arase and Pedro Amakasu Raposo); Black Europe and a Contested European Union; In: The Open Veins of the Postcolonial: Afrodescendants and Racism, edited by Iolanda Evora and Inocencia Mata (Tagus Press, Dartmouth, 2022); Araújo, Marta; Nimako, Kwame (2022), Mobilizing History: Racism, Enslavement and Public Debate in Contemporary Europe, in Shirley Anne Tate and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; Lost and Found: sovereignties and state formations in Africa and Asia, In: Routledge Handbook of Africa-Asia Relations, edited by Pedro Miguel Amakasu Raposo de Medeiros Carvalho, David Arase and Scarlett Cornelissen (Routledge: London 2018); Kwame Nkrumah: In the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia on Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism (London 2016); Layers of Emancipation Struggles: Some Reflections on the Dutch Case; In: Smash the Pillars (Lexington Books, London, 2018), edited by Melissa E. Weinar and Antonio Carmona Baez; ‘Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony of Africana Intellectual Tradition’ In: Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, Postcoloniality,-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014); and Nkrumah, African Awakening and Neo-colonialism: How Black America awakened Nkrumah and Nkrumah awakened Black America In: The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research (Vol 40, No.2 Summer 2010).

Monique ROELOFS is Professor and Chair of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on decolonial, feminist, and Black aesthetics, and art and politics. Her first book, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury, 2014) theorizes the notion of the aesthetic in light of its entanglements with questions of race and gender, through the notions of relationality, address, and the promise/threat. In her second book, Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020), she offers an account of the concept of address that brings out its potentialities as a tool of cultural criticism and aesthetic production, and its ubiquity as a register of embodied sociality. Roelofs recently co-edited the collection Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings (2024), bringing together artists, poets, philosophers, and critics in this burgeoning field. Currently she is completing a monograph exploring the world-making and world-unsettling aesthetic capacities of address. Her new book Strange Tastes: Aesthetic Sensibility and the Public in Latin American and Latinx Feminisms, which analyzes the strange as an aesthetic category and highlights its centrality to critical and democratizing figurations of aesthetic publicness, will appear with Duke University Press in 2026.

Dr Rehnuma SAZZAD is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is an Associate Editor and a Reviews Editor of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, an Editorial Advisory Board Member for English: Journal of the English Association, and a co-editor of TheJournal of Historical Fictions. Her first monograph, Edward Said’s Concept of Exile: Identity and Cultural Migration in the Middle East (2017), creates a portrait of redoubtable intellectual practice in today’s world by adding new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity. She has published a considerable number of pieces on postcolonial and world literatures. She has nearly completed her second monograph reflecting on linguistic nationalism in decolonized South Asia, Dynamics among Mother Language, Motherland, and Liberation Struggle: Decolonization of South Asia in Perspective. She is co-editing a volume on Édouard Glissant’s concepts, which is going to be published from Liverpool University Press (2025/26). She is also editing a collection for Vernon Press, Decolonizing the Curriculum: Teaching Race and Developing Knowledge about Indigenous Literature. She is a regular contributor for Impakter Limited, a London-based online magazine for Culture and Society.

Sanjukta SUNDERASON is art historian working at interfaces of visual art, political thought, and decolonization in South Asia and the Global South. Her current research project studies now artists and cultural thinkers from the decolonizing world of the 20th century were intervening in plural, contesting ideas of freedom. Sanjukta is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020). She is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and Humanities Coordinator of the university’s trans-faculty Research Priority Area, Decolonial Futures.

Michael L. THOMAS is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Critical Cultural Theory capacity group at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches in Media Studies as a part of the Film Team. He has held positions as a Humboldt Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Freie University Berlin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and coordinator of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University, and a Post-Doctoral Lecturer in Structured Liberal Education at Stanford University, among others. He specializes in work in Social Aesthetics, an investigation of aesthetic dimensions of social life. He has published work in the Critical Philosophy of Race, Philosophy and Literature, American Studies, Social Theory, Political Theory, Speculative Philosophy, and most recently Band Research. In each of these arenas, he uses aesthetic feeling, art and media objects, or reflections on aesthetic theory to analyze sociological processes and their implications in the search for novel ways of organizing “social life.”

Special thanks to the enthusiasm and support from:

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis

Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area

Black Europe Summer School

Research Center for Material Culture at het Wereldmuseum

Literary and Cultural Analysis Bachelor Program, Research Master in Cultural Analysis, Master in Comparative and Cultural Analysis

Special thanks for curatorial support from: Layal Ftouni, Quinsy Gario, Yolande Jansen, Kwame Nimako, Wayne Modest, Kwame Nimako, and Sanjukta Sunderason.

Also, heartfelt thanks to Jaap Kooijman, Eloe Kingma, Jantine van Gogh, Emily de Klerk; Eliana Cusato, Sanjukta Sunderason, Darshan Vigneswaran; Pepita Hesselberth, Kim Sommer; Olombi Bois, Ilaria Obata, Esmee Schoutens, Carine Zaayman; Emiel Martens; Niall Martin and Esther Peeren.

Event organized by: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Sanjukta Sunderason.