Thu 07 Feb 2019

Fanon, Africa and the Arab World

Introduction to and reading of Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (1961)
followed by a screening and discussion of the 

Film: Concerning Violence - Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence
by Göran Hugo Olsson
Documentary, 2014, Sweden/USA/Denmark/Finland, 85 min, OV English ST

In cooperation with Mayadin Al-Tahrir e.V. and the Werkstatt der Kulturen, and part of the Black History Month

“Concerning Violence – Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence” is both an archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text from Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”. The film re-introduces Fanon’s humanist, post-colonial vision through a cinematic journey that brings us face to face with the people for whom Fanon’s writings on decolonization were not just rhetoric, but a reality. In layering Fanon’s text with archive footage, graphic design and music in a contemporary tone, filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson presents a new generation of audiences with a re-examination of the machinery of colonialism that is at the root of much of the violence we see breaking out in parts of the world today.

 

Guests:
Nayera A. Soliman (Freie Universität Berlin) is currently a PhD fellow at the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Societies and Cultures at Freie Universitat Berlin. Her research project is questioning the concept of home through studying the 1967 forced migration in Suez Canal cities in Egypt. She graduated from the French section of the Political Sciences Department of the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University in 2012; she holds a masters degree in Political Sociology from Sorbonne University in 2013. Between 2014 and 2017, Nayera worked as fellow researcher at the Arab Forum for Alternatives in a joint-research project with the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and Sfax University.

Iskandar Abdalla (Freie Universität Berlin) is a PhD student at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies working on the research project „Rendering Islam Liberal: Secularism, Sexulaity and Politics of Muslim Self-appropriation in Contemporary Germany.“ In his MA thesis in Islamic Sciences, he dealt with the representation of Jews in Egyptian cinema. Abdalla was trained among others at the Deutsche Welle, works as a guide at the Jewish Museum Berlin and as a film curator for the alfilm Festival Berlin.

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