How do we confront violent and catastrophic histories of others? How do we understand the politics of commemoration and denial of certain violent episodes when the ‘other/s’ has been constructed as an enemy or an inferior? We contemplate these questions by thinking with and through Frantz Fanon’s writings at the height of the global struggles of decolonization in the 1950s and 60s. The readings are divided into three sections: Violent encounters, the recognition of otherness, and confronting the pains of others. The readings trace the ways in which the Euro-American worlds have racialized their “other/s”: the native, the savage, the black, the Semite, the colonized, the Orient, the underdeveloped...etc. to critique the ways in which such racialized representations were carried through violence and violation of the non-white populations in different colonial contexts. In this sense, this course is focused on the critique of Europe to carve ways of understanding violence outside the gravity of Eurocentrism.

Note: The course pays a particular attention to the role of power in writing the history of violent episodes and their commemoration in museums. To this end, we navigate many topics through films, as well as [COVID permitting] a visit to the Holocaust Memorial and the African American History Museum in Detroit.

Class Format:

Seminar.