Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past with David Ventura

Show notes: In this episode, I'm joined by David Ventura, Associate Res earcher at Newcastle University, whose work engages the Black Radical Tradition, colonial temporality, and practices of refusal. We discuss his recent article, "History and Histories: Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past," which revisits an enduring question within decolonial thought: What relationship should struggle for liberation have to the past?Drawing together the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Ventura challenges readings that position the two thinkers in opposition. Instead, he argues that both provide indispensable resources for thinking about how colonial histories continue to structure contemporary life, while also illuminating the traces of resistance, invention, and fugitivity that make decolonized futures imaginable.Our conversation explores Fanon's psychiatric practice in Algeria, Glissant's distinction between History with a capital "H" and plural histories, the political significance of creolization, debates surrounding Negritude, and competing interpretations of revolutionary rupture, historical memory, and the possibility of invention. Along the way, we consider what it means to read Fanon and Glissant together, not as rivals, but as complementary thinkers whose work helps us better understand the temporalities of colonialism, the persistence of its afterlives, and the poetic and ethical practices through which they might be refused.Biography: David Ventura is an Associate Researcher at Newcastle University (UK), where he recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focused on Édouard Glissant. Broadly speaking, David’s work engages the Black radical tradition to interrogate how the history of transatlantic slavery continues to structure the political coordinates of today’s world, as well as the radical practices and poetics through which that structuration might be displaced and refused. David’s research has featured in Philosophy & Social Criticism, The C.L.R. James Journal, and with German Primera, he recently co-edited a special issue of Paragraph on the topic of time and refusal. David is currently working on a book project, titled Poetics of Refusal: Refiguring Fugitivity with Édouard Glissant, which expounds Glissant’s imaginary of refusal by examining a series of figures of refusal that appear in his fictional writings. Links: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0030_0001_0221_0248