Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique du CRÉ, Sujaya Dhanvantari nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Fanon and Unliveability ».

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Résumé

This paper locates the concept of unliveability in a broader history of systemic racism and colonial oppression. I argue that this history is integral for understanding the social structures that elicit pain, illness, and trauma. This paper asks: What is revealed when critiques of racial and colonial oppression are centred in the concept of unliveability? How is intergenerational pain and trauma reflected in the bodily and psychic health of racialized and colonized peoples? By expanding the racial and colonial categories of unliveability through a reading of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 essay, “The North African Syndrome,” I propose that the unredressed historical trauma of racialization and colonization structures affectivity for the racialized and colonized subject. My contention is that Fanon offers a theory of pain that advances an understanding of the colonial duration shaping pathological conditions. It also proposes the grounds for a critical therapeutic, specific to the racialized patient. The Fanonian approach, I conclude, is important for addressing experiences of unliveability, which persist within the ontological dimensions of racial and colonial oppression that constitute our colonial and anti-Black world.