Event overview
French activist and International Frantz Fanon Foundation president Mireille Fanon-Mendès- France discusses the legacies and continued relevance of Frantz Fanon’s work
Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2020
Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France - Institutional Psychotherapy and the life/work of Frantz Fanon
Respondent: Ramon Amaro
Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961) was a psychiatrist, writer, and anti-colonial militant. His contribution to the history of ideas, especially concerning issues of decolonialisation, cannot be overstated. His work continues to influence generations of militant thought and practice.
He is cited as a foundational figure from the Black Panther Party to the field of postcolonial theory and everywhere in between. Fanon was first and foremost a psychiatrist who was deeply committed to social therapy and the project of Institutional Analysis.
It was his diagnosis of colonialism and racism as creating specific psychosocial pathologies that led him to conclude the ‘cure’ for this form of mental illness could only be achieved by fundamentally restructuring the social conditions in which people lived.
Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France is a French academic, activist and president of the International Frantz Fanon Foundation. She has taught literature at the National Education and didactics at the continuing education centre of University Paris V- Descartes. She has also worked for UNESCO and for the National Assembly. She has written numerous articles on human rights and international and humanitarian law, on the process of radicalization and discrimination, on the coloniality of power, and on issues concerning knowledge and Being.
Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures. Dr. Amaro's work emerges at the convergence of Blackness, psychopathology and the critique of computation reason. Dr. Amaro draws on Frantz Fanon’s theories of sociogenic alienation to problematize the de-localisation of the Black psyché in contemporary computational systems such as machine learning and generative adversarial (neural) networks.
Part of The Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2020 series The Institution Overturned Organised by Janna Graham and Anthony Faramelli. This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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27 Feb 2020 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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