The Frantz Fanon Prize
The Frantz Fanon Prize
"Chaque génération doit,
dans une relative opacité,
découvrir sa mission,
l´accomplir ou la trahir."- Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (1961)
The Frantz Fanon Prize is awarded annually in recognition of up to three works in or of special interest to Caribbean thought. The nominations are made during the fall of each year, and the winners are chosen and announced by February of the succeeding year. The plaque of acknowledgment is given at a ceremony and book session at the annual conference of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Only books published within 6 years of the nomination date can be considered for the award. Each winning author automatically becomes a member of the committee for the prize.
The Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Chabani Manganyi
Dr. Chabani Manganyi stands not only among South Africa’s but also the globe’s most eminent clinical and theoretical psychologists and social theorists. A committed intellectual activist during the traumatic apartheid years and beyond, Dr. Manganyi oversaw the transformation of the South African Department of Education when he served as the Director-General from 1994 to 1999.
Despite facing many obstacles from his youth, he managed to attend the then University of the North (now the University of Limpopo) and later the University of South Africa (UNISA), to become one of the country’s first Black psychologists. In 1970, he received his doctorate with his thesis entitled “Body Image in Paraplegia,” followed by post-doctoral research at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Manganyi’s many books include the classic Being-black-in-the-world (Raven Press, 1973; new edition by Wits University Press and NYU Press, 2019), followed by texts on E’skia Mphahlele, Gerard Sekoto, and Dumile Feni. In some of his writings he incisively examined the effects of institutionalized racism that characterized South Africa, including alienation and distorted individual body relations amidst a quest for freedom. Some of the early works were the first serious attempts by a South African psychologist to engage with the interface between the individual and society in the context of both symmetrical and asymmetrical relations of power, which were welcomed by many researchers who were searching for a psychology better able to make sense of the internal and more explicit social realities of the lives of the majority of South Africans. He identified several critical imperatives for a more generative South African psychology, among which was his appeal that mental health services should be made more appropriate and accessible to all South Africans, a call which is still pertinent today.
Manganyi’s intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the narrow confines of psychology. In 2016 he turned the lens on himself to write a memoir and autobiography entitled Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist, which won the Academy of Science of South Africa’s Humanities Book Award in 2018. The book illuminates the history of South Africa through sensitive, insightful, personalized accounts of the devastating effects of rural poverty, family dislocation, migrant labor, and Bantu Education on entire communities. The memoir gains its authority from the Manganyi’s skills as a psycho-biographer, as well as his restraint as a writer even as he recounts painful recurring episodes of personal and family suffering through the course of his life. Manganyi found even in the most oppressive circumstances opportunities for learning, which advanced his career. He refused to yield to the many obstacles in his path as a Black man and a psychologist.
In addition to being one of this year’s recipients of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, Manganyi’s many accolades include Honorary Fellow of the Psychological Society of South Africa (2012), the Humanities Book Award of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (2018), Lifetime Achievement Award, National Research Foundation (2016).
In the words of Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:
Chabani Manganyi’s clinical and intellectual achievements stand as an exemplar of a life dedicated to usurping the power of institutionalized racism from the level of the singular human being struggling to survive and thrive, to the broader social level in which social structures themselves exert relentless power against that very struggle. Manganyi’s work carries on the tradition of radical struggle inaugurated by Fanon himself.
Sylvia Marcos
Discurso de recepción del Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Dr. Sylvia Marcos is a psychologist and scholar committed to Indigenous and feminist movements throughout the Americas and across the globe. She works at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos. She was founder of the CIDHAL Documentation Center in 1974, and Professor of Psychology at the Benemérita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP). Her research and publications contribute to the fields of feminist critical epistemology, Mesoamerican religions, and women within Indigenous movements, while promoting an antihegemonic-feminist practice, theory, and hermeneutics. Her recent book is entitled Una poética de la insurgencia zapatista (AKAL, 2024), and her many other books such as Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Brill, 2006), El libro Dialogo y Diferencia: retos feministas a la globalización (2008), Mujeres , Indígenas, Rebeldes Zapatistas (2011), Cruzando Fronteras: mujeres indígenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda (Quimantú, 2017). For a full list, please consult the bibliography on her website.
Dr. Marcos has participated in many social and critical movements. She was part of Ivan Illich’s Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a proposal of the early 1970s with a critical anti-institutional analysis of churches, schools, and medical establishments. She was a colleague of Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, and her political theoretical thought is inspired by her work among Zapatista women and that entire movement. Her intellectual work includes Mayan thought, particularly the duality of equal and complementary mutual interconnectedness and interdependence of feminine and masculine life. She is also a contributor to thinking epistemologies beyond hegemonic and centrist models from the global north.
In 2023, Dr. Marcos was honored by the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) with the founding of La Cátedra Sylvia Marcos (the Sylvia Marcos Chair).
President Jacqueline Martinez observes that:
Sylvia Marcos is the embodiment of our highest ideals of intellectual work that is intricately interwoven with the daily life needs and aspirations of communities who are objects of colonial oppression in all of its forms. She stands as an exemplar of courage and conviction lived in projects that elevate the health and well-being of people and communities whose humanity is most at risk within the Euromodern colonial systems of thought.
The Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought
Unpayable Debt
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. Sternberg Press, 2022.
Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.
In the words of one of the evaluators:
It is without doubt one of the most remarkable, brilliant, and audacious books that I have ever read. I cannot think of a more deserving book and author for this significant award.
I am so delighted to have been asked to evaluate this book. The nuance, creativity of its author’s thought, and subtlety of her analysis on this and other complex questions of marked enslavement are profound. Ferreira da Silva must be read. Her book deserves this award.
President Martinez agrees:
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt places before us a clear and deeply incisive understanding of the “unpayable debts” incurred through the deployments of coloniality, raciality and economic exploitation as they have exacted an essential and pervasive violence that attacks humanity at its core. This work is a remarkable achievement even within the total oeuvre of this prolific author whose tremendous insights challenge us to reach the same depths of understanding.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and co-Directory of the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab (CRACS), at New York University. An academic, an artist, and an activist her work reflects and speculates on themes crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP & Casa do Povo, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg, 2022), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), and La Deuda Impagable (Tinta Limón, 2023) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (JHUP, 2013) and (with Mark Harris) of Postcolonialism and the Law: Major Works (Routledge 2018) and Indigenous peoples and the Law: Major Works (Routledge, 2019). Her several articles and essays have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Social Identities, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Text, Griffith Law Review, Critical Ethnic Studies, Cultural Dynamics, Amerasia, and Theory & Event and have been translated into several languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Danish. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and held visiting positions at Birkbeck-University of London’s School of Law, La Trobe University’s School of Law, University of São Paulo’s Department of Political Science, Université Paris VIII’s Department of Philosophy. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and Faculty at the European Graduate School. Her artistic works include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (2023), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the art practices Poethical Readings, The Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London) MASP (Sāo Paulo), Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Guggenheim (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), Center for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Tai Khun Contemporary (Shanghai), the Kunsthalle Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), the 2022 Singapore Biennale, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the 35th Sao Paulo Biennale. She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and featured in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, Artalk, and E-Flux. She is a founding member of the EhChO Platform and works closely with the feminist collectives Teia de Solidariedade da Zona Oeste (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Periferia Segue Sangrando (São Paulo, Brazil).
Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.
In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis’s study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement’s place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.
In the words of one evaluator:
Robcis’s scholarship in her chapter on the Catalan anti-fascist psychiatrist François Tosquelles and the early Saint Alban school is breathtaking. It outlines the tenets of the philosophy of the radical movement within psychiatry called "institutional psychotherapy" whose political dimensions emphasize breaking down all forms of walls, encampment, occupation, and segregation which function as technologies of "the-all-power" seeking to de-socialize, alienate, and colonize human reality. After reading the book, I find it impossible to understand Fanon’s thought without studying the history of institutional psychotherapy and the milieu of ideas in which he was trained as a resident. The connections jump out with vigor. Readers will be awestruck by just how innovative and courageous Tosquelles himself was, as we are talking about a man who thought some of his best clinical work was conducted in a makeshift clinic, he operated out of a refugee camp (more like a concentration camp) in Vichy France.
… suffice to say that Robcis is thinking big, as her ultimate argument is that institutional psychotherapy (particularly through Fanon) resulted in a creolizing of French theory.
According to President Martinez:
Camille Robcis’ Disalienation offers a deeply insightful account of the consequences of the institutional deployment of thought in the practices of care for the human psyche. This work reveals the deeply human cost of “fascist psychiatry” and the courageousness of those who recognize and struggle against this kind of “colonization of human reality.”
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. In addition to Disalienation, she is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled The War on Gender. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
The Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Achievements in Science, Philosophy, and Leadership
Stephon Alexander
Dr. Stephon Alexander is a theoretical and computational physicist, and author whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, AI, quantum gravity and music technology. His expertise is in constructing new theories of the early universe and elementary particle physics that has predictions for the universe at present, such as dark energy and dark matter. He also combines mathematics and tools from theoretical physics into machine learning, the geometry and cognition of musical perception, signal processing and computational algorithms. Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University and a past President of the National Society of Black Physicists. Alexander was also the Executive Director of the Harlem Gallery of Science. He had previous appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College, Penn State, Dartmouth College, and Haverford College. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string theory and cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of cosmic inflation based on string theory.
In his critically acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics (Basic Books, 2017), Alexander revisits the ancient interconnection between music and the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways music, in particular jazz music, mirrors modern physics, such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the physics of the early universe. He also discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from “improvisational logic” exemplified in jazz performance and practice. His most recent book is Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics (Basic Books, 2021).
The great Antiguan Brown University Professor Emeritus Paget Henry, the first winner of the Frantz Fanon Award for his classic Caliban’s Reason (2000) and a member of the Awards Committee states:
The Philosophy of Science in the Caribbean is still very much an underdeveloped area. But I see the future of it very much in the hands of Stephon Alexander. I would say more than any other individual, he is at least the future face of Afro-Caribbean Philosophy of Science.
President Martinez adds:
Stephon Alexander’s work shows us how deeply relevant our human artistic endeavors, especially jazz, are to the very energies through which life and matter emerge and evolve at the sub-atomic level. His work reminds us that our highest scientific achievements are always marked by a concern with the interrelatedness of all life in the universe.
Frantz Fanon Prize — Previous Recipients
2023
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Gerald Horne
BOOK
Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
2022
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Angela Y. Davis
Barbara Ransby
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
OUTSTANDING ACTIVIST
Amanda Alexander
BOOK
Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press, 2021.
2021
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Hussein Bulhan
Silvia Federici
Rita Laura Segato
BOOK
Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press, 2019.
2020
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
María Lugones
BOOK
Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. Verso, 2018.
2019
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Catherine Walsh
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
Vijay Prashad
BOOK
Ato Sekyi-Otu, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. Routledge, 2018.
2018
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Samir Amin
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France
BOOK
Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre: Une Philosophie de la Violence. Paris: La Découverte, 2017.
2017
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Carole Boyce Davies
Maureen MacGrogan
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
Eduardo Mendieta
BOOK
Michael Neocosmos, Thinking Freedom in Africa. Johannesburg, SA: Wits UP, 2016.
Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
2016
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun
BOOK
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
Peter J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830. Albany, NY: State University of New York P, 2013.
2015
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Grace Lee Boggs
P. Magobo More
BOOK
José Guadalupe Salgado Gandarilla, Asedios a la totalidad. Poder y política en la modernidad desde un encare de-colonial. UNAM, 2012.
Olúfémi Táíwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Indiana UP, 2010.
2014
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Leonard Harris
Abdul JanMohamed
(Letter of Appreciation by Harris)
BOOK
John Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other. Edinburgh UP, 2013.
2013
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Fernando Picó
Carlos Rojas Osorio
2012
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Keith Sandiford
BOOK
Nathalie Etoke, Melancholia Africana: L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire. Paris: Éditions du Cygne, 2010.
2011
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Molefi Kete Asante
Michel Rolph-Trouillot
BOOK
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
2010
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Bernard Boxill
(Letter of Appreciation by Boxill)
BOOK
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, What if Latin America Ruled the World?: How the Second World Will Take the First into the 22nd Century. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Export Edition, 2007.
Ángel Quintero, Cuerpo y cultura: Las músicas “mulatas” y la subversión del baile. Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009.
2009
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Enrique Dussel
Nigel Gibson
BOOK
Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford UP, 2006.
Nigel Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Polity P, 2003.
2008
BOOK
Drucilla Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Patricia Donatien-Yssa, L’exorcisme de la Bles: Vaincre la Souffrance dans Autobiographie de ma Mere de Jamaica Kincaid. Paris: Manuscrit, 2007.
2007
BOOK
Elias Bongmba, Dialectics of Transformation in Africa. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)Locations. Kingston, JA: U of the West Indies P, 2004.
Catherine Reindhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
2006
BOOK
Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006.
2005
BOOK
Alejandro J. De Oto, Política del Sujeto Postcolonial. Mexico City, MX: El Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa, El Colegio de México, 2003.
Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004.
2004
BOOK
Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason. New York: Routledge, 2000.
The Frantz Fanon Prize Committee
Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University
Marina Banchetti-Robino, Florida Atlantic University
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University
Elias K. Bonbmba, Rice University
Bernard Boxill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University
Susan Buck-Morss, CUNY Graduate Center
Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University (Emeritus)
Glen Coulthard, University of British Columbia
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, University Paris-Diderot
Patricia Donatien-Yssa, Université Antilles-Guyane
Elsa Dorlin, Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University
John Drabinski, Amherst College
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, California State University East Bay
Enrique Dussel, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México
Nathalie Etoke, CUNY Graduate Center
Sibylle Fischer, New York University
José Guadalupe Salgado Gandarilla, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa
Nigel Gibson, Emerson College
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Birkbeck College
Leonard Harris, Purdue University
Clevis Headley, Florida Atlantic University
Paget Henry, Brown University
Abdul JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley
Maureen MacGrogan, Rowman & Littlefield
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, University of California at Berkeley
Linda Martín Alcoff, CUNY Graduate Center
Thomas Meagher, Sam Houston State University
Brinda Mehta, Mills College
Eduardo Mendieta, Pennsylvania State University
Walter Mignolo, Duke University
Mabogo More, University of Limpopo
Michael Neocosmos, Rhodes University
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Lewis University
Alejandro de Oto, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia-Argentina
Peter J. Park, The University of Texas at Dallas
Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Ángel Quintero, Creighton University
Catherine Reinhardt-Zacair, Chapman University
Neil Roberts, Williams College
Jean-Paul Rocci, University of Paris VII
Carlos Rojas Osorio
Ato Sekyi-Otu, York University
Keith Sandiford, University of Manitoba
Santiago Slabodsky, Hofstra University
Olúfémi Táíwò, Cornell University
Catherine Walsh, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar
