March 5, 2026
Social Sciences Matrix
Join the Department of African American Studies for the second Black Critical Theory Initiative lecture, with Dr. Axelle Karera. This talk returns to two of Frantz Fanon’s major contributions to philosophy with the aim to reassess their role and status in contemporary critical theories. It begins by asking why philosophy’s readings of Fanon continue to portray his work as a “romance of emancipation”, while losing sight of its most prophetic dimension – namely, that he had predicted the fate of the postcolony? From its “distinctive regime[s] of violence” to its sacrificial forms of power, the talk shows how the postcolonial event kept Fanon radically suspicious of all teleological conceptions of anti-colonial revolutions. Rather, as Karera contends, the relevance of Fanon’s work for contemporary readers ought to be guided by his complex understanding of “revolution”, which remains irreducible to any institutions or ideologies.