Presentation
Dangerous Freedom: Fanon, Fact of Blackness, and the Death Drive
Colorado College
(2019)
Abstract
The Martiniquan decolonial thinker Franz Fanon is enjoying a revival today. With the collapse of the dream of post-racial societies and multiculturalism under siege from ethno-nationalist forces, scholars are returning to Fanon’s writings to better understand racial conflicts in the global world. In his talk, Basu Thakur will engage with Fanon’s "Black Skin, White Masks," and "The Wretched of the Earth" to discuss Fanon’s thinking about race, identity, and Blackness. Through a contrapuntal reading or short-circuiting of Fanon with Lacan, Basu Thakur will highlight Fanon’s theorization of Blackness, its relation to race relations within colonial society, and the connection between Blackness, ontology, and decolonial revolutionary violence. Fanon’s identification of Blackness as nonbeing or nes pas (death drive) and therefore in terms of ontology, Basu Thakur will argue, offers a provocative understanding of the social as inherently non-relational, helping push contemporary discussions of racial inequality and/or racism from the domain of moral symbolic politics (“racism is bad”) toward that of ethics (what is connection between racism, desire, and subjectivity) and a politics of the impossible or real.
Disciplines
Publication Date
November 4, 2019
Location
Colorado Springs, CO
Citation Information
Gautam Basu Thakur. "Dangerous Freedom: Fanon, Fact of Blackness, and the Death Drive" Colorado College (2019) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gautam_basu_thakur/55/