The Frantz Fanon Foundation (FFF) has received a number of queries about the cancellation of our panel “Fanon champ de bataille / Fanon as a battlefield” at the annual meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). We are not entire sure of all the reasons why the panel was cancelled, but we can confidently report the following:
- There was no consultation or discussion with the FFF or any of the panel’s presenters about the cancellation of the panel.
- No one from the FFF was notified about the panel’s cancellation before the arrival of one of our members to the conference site in the morning of the day when the panel was supposed to take place.
- That the panel cancellation took place in the context of celebrating Fanon’s centennial in his native land of Martinique was surely an added punitive act towards the FFF.
- We were told that not only the panel was cancelled, but also that our Co-President Mireille Fanon Mendès France was not welcome in the conference site: the Hanétha Veté-Congolo Elementary School. We were also told that these actions were taken as a result of a public argument between Mireille Fanon Mendès France and Hanétha Veté-Congolo, a former CPA President who was the host and local organizer of the conference. The FFF was not asked about its version of the altercation, or consulted about any ways to handle the situation.
- The panel presenters were ready to participate in the panel in spite of feeling that the FFF’s contribution was not adequately valued or considered. This was evident in the plenary with anti-colonial, decolonial, and anti-racist organizers that the FFF was able to hold in the first day of the school. The plenary counted with eight presenters from movements in Martinique, Guadaloupe, Kanaky, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. The plenary was originally given 3 hours. Then there was an agreement to give it 2.5 hours. When the plenary was introduced, the CPA President stated that the plenary would take from 1.5 to 2 hours.
In spite of the time limitations and technical difficulties, our first day plenary managed to put forward the work of liberation activists from several colonies throughout the Caribbean and the world. We were very proud of offering such platform for internationalist connection between eight militant grassroots organisations and the younger generation of intellectuals revolving around the CPA.
The cancelled panel was meant to build from the plenary and provide a space to consider the ways in which Fanon’s work is currently being mobilized to support but also to undermine liberation movements.
For the FFF, the cancellation of the panel and the lack of communication and consultation with the panel presenters demonstrates a profound lack of professionalism and a fundamental detachment and lack of interest in the intellectual and political orientation of the conference participants that the FFF brought to the conference. It was also a disrespectful act towards the FFF and its invitees, including the plenary participants.
The cancellation of the panel also demonstrates that one thing is to verbally affirm the value of grassroots decolonial organizing and of the intellectual activities that take place outside of the academy, and another is to actually have the ability to respect, work with, and learn from organizations that prioritize the emergence and cultivation of such thinking-in-action.
In line with Fanon’s own trajectory, for the FFF, it is precisely in sites of grassroots organizing and related collectives that the most creative and radical decolonial intellectual work takes place. Demolishing the walls between academia and such organizations should be a priority for anyone who claims to be engaged in anti-racist and decolonial thinking in the academy.
In cancelling the panel, the CPA leadership who supported this act reproduced one of the worst aspects of the coloniality of knowledge that the organization presumably aims to counter, and showed limits in its project of “shifting the geography of reason.” They censured a conversation and exchange that was seeking to expand the horizon of decolonial thinking within the halls of a professional organization that apparently remains too close to the vision, mission, and habits of Westernized academia and to the position of elites in the Global South.