Achille Mbembe - Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality

Achille Mbembe, political scientist and philosopher, speaks on the 20th century Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (Martinique). The Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) held a 2-day workshop featuring collaborative reading, rendering of recent research, and mapping of new directions in the study of anticolonial/critical/ comparative psychiatries from two of the greatest minds: Frantz Fanon and Louis Mars (Haiti), who have never been studied in tandem, even though both engaged with mental health through the lens of racial alienation, anthropological encounters, colonial pathologies, and pan-African intertextuality with continental philosophy. A project of the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) at Duke University, Humanities Futures is a multi-faceted exploration of the states and directions of the humanities, in light of the interdisciplinary developments of recent decades. Supported by a general grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Humanities Futures is a initiative running from Fall 2014 through Fall 2017.