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It is the pleasure of the Masters programs at the American University of Paris to host an international and bilingual conference on contemporary critical and experimental engagement with Frantz Fanon’s work, co-organized by Lisa Damon, Sousan Hammad and François Huguet.
The conference will take place at AUP and at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien and is open to everyone.

On Friday March 30th, from 9:30 to 17:30, at AUP (B-33), 33 Ave. Bosquet, 75007

On Saturday March 31st, from 10:00 to 17:00 at the LMP, 35 rue Léon, 75018

Fifty years after many of the African, Asian and Latin American liberation struggles resulted in the construction of independent nations, a new wave of uprisings and social movements have emerged worldwide to overthrow dictatorial regimes and demand revision of the global socioeconomic status quo. Frantz Fanon’s work was key in setting the ideals and modes of action for a generation engaged in changing its present. Is there anything to actualize from his praxis?

‘Testing’ his ideas in contemporary local contexts from Nigeria and South Africa to Palestine and Venezuela, what is translatable and what must be discarded? How do Fanonian problematics help clarify, or instead obscure, a sense of our own situatedness in the present?

Speakers include, amongst others: Alice Cherki, biographer and colleague of Frantz Fanon in Algeria, author of Frantz Fanon, portrait and La Frontière invisible, violences de l’immigration who will address the relevance and modalities of teaching Fanon today; Nigel Gibson, activist and scholar, author most recently of Fanonian practices in South Africa: from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo who will trace Fanon’s concept of the ‘rationality of revolt’ through
the black power and liberation movements of the 60s to today’s social movements; Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, socio-anthropologist and maitre de conférences HDR at Paris 13, author of Les féministes et le garçon arabe and La république mise à nu par son immigration, who will question what it means for Fanon to have died as an Algerian and the gaps in his critical insight stemming from his identity as a heterosexual male; Ghassan Hage, professor at the University of Melbourne and author of White Nation: fantasies of White Supremacy in a multicultural society, who will examine Fanon’s critique of negritude in order to ask how one can argue for cultural specificity without falling into the trap of essentialism; Ella Shohat, professor of cultural studies at New York University, author of forthcoming Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012), will examine Fanon’s figures of “the Black”, “the Jew”, and “the Arab” in the context of the politics of translation of The Wretched of the Earth into Hebrew (2006).

But also Nils Schott, George Ciccariello-Maher, Feargal Ionnrachtaigh, Alain Anselin, Norman Ajari, Omar El Khairy, Will Hansen & Umma Aliyu, Donna-Dale Marcano, Olivier Haddouchi & Marguerite Vappereau.

Full program details on http://nomadtranslations.wordpress.com/

For more information please contact [email][email protected]