Colonial Cartographies of Power and Knowledge

Colonial Cartographies of Power and Knowledge

Dr. Mireille Fanon Mendès-France
Africana Studies Visiting Research Associate, Paris Descartes University
in conversation with
Dr. Silvia Marsans-Sakly
Associate Professor of the Practice History and the Islamic World, Fairfield University

Dr. Fanon Mendès-France is a French jurist and anti-racist activist. She has taught at Paris Descartes University and was also a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley in international law and conflict resolution. She has been invited to speak at many prestigious US and European universities on issues of international law, human rights, and decolonial theory. She has worked for UNESCO and the French National Assembly and also works on issues of land tenure in countries where people were enslaved and indigenous people annihilated after colonization. In 2009, she received the Human Rights Prize from the Council for Justice, Equality, and Peace. Since 2011, she has been an expert for the United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent, which she chaired from 2014 to 2016. In addition to being an authority on Frantz Fanon, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France is a scholar of decolonial theory and a founding member of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, which she co-chairs.

Dr. Marsans-Sakly is an Associate Professor of the Practice in History and the Islamic World at Fairfield University.  She earned her MA in Near East Studies and Journalism and her Ph.D. in the joint program of Middle East and Islamic Studies and European History from NYU. A three-year stint training English teachers in Tunisia with the US Peace Corps sparked her interest in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research areas focus on state formation, colonialism, and decoloniality as well as resistance movements in the Global South. In the fall of 2023, she will publish her book, "Power, Protest and Memory in Tunisia 1864-2011," with IB Tauris for which she received an NEH grant.