Year: 2023-2024
Research Team Type: Student-led
Organizers: Adam Hasan, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of Geography, Black Geographies Collective; Sibahle Ndwayana, UC Berkeley Department of Geography, Black Geographies Collective
Anticolonial intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon’s influences have inspired the work of liberation movements worldwide and continue to generate robust cross-disciplinary debate by scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and medical fields. The Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective aims to provide an institutional home for graduate scholarship on decolonization, anti-colonialism, and liberation at Berkeley and the broader Bay Area, providing a space to think with Fanon’s work and its afterlives through an interdisciplinary geographic lens. We aim to understand Fanon’s contributions in relation to the realities he faced and, most importantly, fold them in with other intellectuals and activists’ contexts, i.e., trying to understand his work in relation to our realities. Using analytical frameworks from interdisciplinary fields, including Black geographies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology, the Collective grounds our thinking, writing, and practice in concrete historical and geographic contexts where Fanon’s work has been taken up and stretched in new directions. In a world increasingly defined by violent hostility to historically marginalized communities and people, the urgent relevance of Fanon’s work on liberation extends beyond the confines of the academy. To this end, the Collective fosters conversations that cross not only disciplinary boundaries but also the boundaries of the academy itself. The Collective’s goals include four primary programmatic areas: a year-long, bi-weekly graduate student reading group; a one time faculty colloquium guest talk; a second-semester graduate working paper series with the intended goal of an edited volume; and a public-facing film series curated in collaboration with BAMPFA.