Figuring out the Mechanisms of Domination

It was to show the topicality of Frantz Fanon’s thinking on the mechanisms of colonial domination that the Espaces Marx organized a debate on this subject on Saturday, 17 September, at the Rhone regional stand at the Fête de l’Humanité. It was to discover this man, who was born in Fort-de-France in 1925, died in 1961, and buried in Algeria - a psychiatrist, writer, and thinker, of whom Aimé Césaire said "He is a paraclet, one whose life has become a call to us to live." Alice Cherki, psychiatrist and author of the biography Frantz Fanon, a Portrait, described with emotion the man with whom she had worked, first in the psychiatric service in Blida, then in Tunisia, where that militant awakener of consciousness, fighting for the independence of Algeria, had to find refuge, having been expelled by the French government. It is above all the writer with his love of words that Christiane Chaulet-Achour, professor of literature at the University of Cergy, evoked, before the psychiatrist Bernard Doré opened the debate on the question of the topicality of Fanon’s thinking. At the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January 2007, Frantz Fanon will have a space all to himself, "for a new altermondialist universalism", a place for reflection on how to pass beyond the old colonial relations of domination. Didn’t the author of "Black Skin, White Masks" and of "The Damned of the Earth" also write "Universality resides in this grasp of the reciprocal relativism of different cultures once irremediably excluded from existence under colonial rule."