Fanon
Join us for a free screening of the biopic Fanon followed by a discussion with Cornell faculty members members Naminata Diabate (Comparative Literature), Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) and Olúfémi Táíwo (Africana Studies) about the great anti-colonial theorist and practitioner Frantz Fanon.
1953: Frantz Fanon has just been appointed chief medical officer at the psychiatric hospital of Blida, Algeria, a year after the publication of his foundational text, Black Skin, White Masks. Very soon, the innovative methods and the humane treatment he gives to Algerian patients attracts the attention of both his French colleagues, as well as Abane Ramdane, the leader of the FLN/National Liberation Front, who encourages him to join the cause. As tensions mount between the French army and FLN, Fanon is accused of being a traitor to France. With his wife Josie, they are caught in a vortex of violence which lead them to take up the cause for the independence of Algeria. (Courtesy of Celluloid Dreams Film Distribution.)
Free admission! Sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Modernities.
Part of our "Campus Collaborations" series. In French and Arabic with English subtitles. Film courtesy of Celluloid Dreams.
About the speakers:
Naminata Diabate is Associate Professor of Compartive Literature at Cornell University and an executive board member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities. She is on the core faculty of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), and affiliated faculty in the Department of Literatures in English; Romance Studies; Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (LGBT); Performing and Media Arts (PMA); and Visual Studies. She is a former Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE (2021-2023). A scholar of African and African diaspora studies and neoliberalism, biopolitics, sexuality and gender studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Diabate engages multiple cultural productions and oral traditions from Francophone and Anglophone Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles. Her most recent provocations on defiant disrobing, pleasure, freedom, and the impact of Internet media on queerness have appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, collections of essays, and podcasts. Diabate's book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke 2020), was awarded the African Studies Association (ASA) 2021 Best Book Prize and the African Literature Association (ALA) 2022 First Book Award. The Africa Report recently listed Naminata Diabate among the Top 10 African Scholars to Watch in 2024.
Natalie Melas is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities. She is the author of the acclaimed study, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford UP, 2007) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (Princeton UP, 2009). She is slowly finishing a book tentatively titled Modern Lyric and Racial Time around Aimé Césaire and C.P. Cavafy. Recently, Melas collaborated on and co-produced two films with architect and spatial theorist Tao Dufour and documentary filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam: an award-winning experimental short film, We Love We Self Up Here (2021) and Possible Landscapes (2024), a feature-length film test screened at Cornell Cinema last fall and debuting at international film festivals this year. Both film are set in Trinidad and Tobago and use documentary techniques to explore intergenerational experiences of landscape and environmental transformation in the Caribbean.
Olúfémi Táíwo is Professor of African Political Thought at Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests move through political thought, social and political philosophy, and African philosophy. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) was a joint winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015. His thinking on Fanon’s work in human sciences was published in one of the first critical retrospectives of Frantz Fanon, On Fanon (Blackwell, 1996). Táíwň publishes is a number of outlets, international journals, newspapers of record, and recently published the short work Can a Liberal Be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal?: Some Thoughts on an Unfinished Business of Colonialism (Prickly Paradigm/U of Chicago Press,2021) and Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst 2022). His current work includes a book on modern African philosophical thought and a monograph tentatively titled Does the United States Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?