Conversation
LETTER "NOT ABOUT COLONY"
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
Saturday, 6 December 2025, at 5 p.m.
To whom were Frantz Fanon’s words once addressed, and to whom are they directed today? His writings called on colonized peoples to overthrow the regimes that had enslaved, dehumanized, and objectified them — a call to build a new, free subjectivity beyond the colonial divide.
Moving between psychiatry and politics, between psychoanalytic practice and direct participation in the decolonial struggle, Fanon pointed to the far-reaching mechanisms through which the colonial subject is constituted and to the destructive effects of the colony’s collective unconscious. He believed that the path to liberation lay solely through purifying, regenerative violence. His ideas influenced both the development of postcolonial theories and the revision of classical Marxism, especially in relation to understanding colonial realities and the anti-colonial revolutionary struggles of the Third World. All of this contributed to the resonance of Fanon’s thought in our own context as well, beginning in the era of non-aligned Yugoslavia.
In the year marking the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, we commemorate it with a conversation at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, featuring: Jovan Bukumira – research associate at the Institute for Literature and Art; Seku Sidi Diavara, doctoral candidate (Faculty of Political Sciences); Aleksa Nikolić – literary translator/researcher (Faculty of Philology, Novi Sad); Lazar Petković – independent researcher, philosopher, translator, and writer; as well as the Cercle Frantz Fanon (Martinique), joining via video address.
Admission free.
