‘This book should have been written three years ago. … But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned.’

For decades, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) has caused controversy, not least amongst feminists and the LBGTQ+ community, for its direct address to the reader to feel the violence and directness of inequities enmeshed in the colonised Black male body. Born in the French colony of Martinique, taught by Aimé Césaire, trained in psychiatry by François Tosquelles in France, and at work at Blida-Joinville, a psychiatric hospital in French colonial Algeria at the start of the Algerian revolution, Fanon was a doctor a philosopher and an anti-imperialist whose life was dedicated to revolutionary practice.

This group will combine close readings of the text, secondary readings and guests whose artistic and curatorial work has been influenced by Fanon.

Anyone can propose a text and help organise a BxNU Prefigurative Reading Group.

Contact Andrea for more information about this event: andrea.phillips@northumbria.ac.uk