In this talk Robert Young will be discussing the new volume of writings by Frantz Fanon, edited by Jean Khalfa and the speaker, the first new material by Fanon to be published in over 60 years. Professor Young will argue that its contribution is to place Fanon’s psychiatry at the theoretical centre of his work, enabling a clear connection to be draw between the early work of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). For Fanon, colonialism, like madness, was most meaningfully conceptualized as a destructuration of consciousness and as a pathology of freedom.

Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at NYU, and Dean of Arts and Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. Before joining NYU in 2005 he was Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University and a fellow of Wadham College. He has held research or visiting professorships at the University of Hong Kong, Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, Monash University, St John’s College, Oxford University, University of Puerto Rico, and University College, Galway, Ireland. His research interests range across the fields of cultural and political history, literature, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis and translation studies, with a particular focus on colonial history and postcolonial theory. His books include White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015), and, with Jean Khalfa, Frantz Fanon. Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, Œuvres II (2015). His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academia Europaea, and Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.