Frantz Fanon Archives - Public Seminar

Colonization

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

A plea for a blank slate and a new beginning

October 9, 2025 • by Kwach Abonyo

Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles. Among his most notable ...

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

Activism

Cinelogue Is Decolonizing the Film Canon

A conversation with the director of a new streaming platform dedicated to global majority filmmakers

December 19, 2023 • by Rehana Esmail and Kate Millar

Cinelogue hosts a library of films that have been carefully selected by international filmmakers and curators from diverse regional foci....

Cinelogue Is Decolonizing the Film Canon

Philosophy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

February 22, 2022 • by Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Uncategorized

Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

The production and discipline of femininity

March 21, 2018 • by Alexandra Tadros

In “Femininity and Domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky examines the underlying causes and effects of women’s subjugation in contemporary society. Though women are generally understood to have equal rights, oppression, she argues, does not have to involve “physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation” in order to have a systemic and ...

Feature

Racial Preference and Grindr

The enduring erotics of colonialism

January 11, 2018 • by Dominic Reilly

Beyond preference vs. prejudice At what point does preference become discrimination? This question was used to frame a recent video produced by Grindr exploring the increasingly prominent topic of “race” and so-called “racial preferences” on hook-up and dating apps. That increasing attention is being paid to the racialized aspects of our partner selections ...

Feature

Black Bachelorette, White Mask

The Patterns of Subjugation and Oppression in Reality TV

July 28, 2017 • by Liz Scheer

There is no more popular culture, only ways of seeing populations as nothing. -- Nina Power, Thirty-one Theses on the Problem of the Public Like many faithful members of Bachelor Nation, I have long watched my favorite television show, The Bachelorette, with a healthy dose of irony. The sheer premise -- thirty-five ...

Feature

The Armenian Violence Question

A Conversation on Means and Social Change

December 13, 2016 • by Tamar Shirinian and Nelli Sargsyan

How do we make sense of a general population's acceptance of militarization? We see the following conversation as an attempt to entangle and disentangle some of the complexities of this particular historical juncture in post-Soviet Armenia. In reflecting on the Armenian experience and on the larger process of postsocialism and ...