MMB Reading Group – William Conroy (2023)

This month the MMB Reading Group will meet to discuss William Conroy’s recent article, ‘Fanon’s Mobilities: Race, Space, Recognition,’ Antipode 2023, which engages with Frantz Fanon’s writing on both geographical and dialectical movement. The discussion will be lead by Natasha Carver, Lecturer in International Criminology and lead for the MMB Challenge Bordering, Control, Justice.

More from the abstract:

‘[The paper] suggests that in particular historical-geographical contexts—such as those described by Fanon himself—geographical patterns of mobility and confinement operate as the presupposition and result of “race”; while also functionally enabling capitalism’s necessary and enduring dialectic of appropriation and capitalisation, and reproducing the Fanonian “zone of nonbeing”. More simply, this article suggests that in certain conjunctures the tight articulation of race, mobility, and capital accumulation inhibits the reciprocal recognition of equals. In those contexts, a spatialised “counter-ontological” politics is the only means of establishing intersubjective symmetry and the preconditions for Fanon’s “new humanism”. This article concretises these arguments in relation to historical work on antebellum “carceral landscapes”. It concludes by drawing explicitly on Stuart Hall’s reflections on articulation and “lines of tendential force” in order to think through the relevance of Fanonian theorisation today.’

To join the meeting, please sign up here. A Zoom link will be sent before the meeting.