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
Rashid Khalidi
Described in The Guardian as “America’s foremost scholar of Palestine,” Rashid Khalidi is one of the great scholars of his generation and an exemplar of extraordinary courage and integrity. His scholarly work includes several distinguished books—including the classic Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), which won the Albert Hourani Book Award—and his editorship of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and his work as an institution-builder includes not only Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University, where he is the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies, but also his membership on the Board of Sponsors of the Palestine–Israel Journal, and a founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Well-known for his public intellectual efforts on the cause for Palestinian rights and self-determination across all forms of media, Khalidi stands as a global intellectual committed to struggles for liberation and freedom as is the namesake of this award.
Khalidi was selected for this award not only for the historical richness of his writings but also, in the words of the Awards Committee, “for his crucial role as a public figure and his commitment to the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, the 2016 winner of the Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, states:
The great historian Rashid Khalidi will receive the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in the same year that the translation of his major book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, is finally published in France.... Rashid Khalidi has contributed to keeping Palestine alive, with the hope of a just and lasting peace.
Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, adds:
Rashid Khalidi, historian and scholar, has dedicated his life to bringing to light the reality and substance of Palestinian identity as an essential aspect of Middle Eastern history. Khalidi’s work challenges us to recognize how the colonial practices carried out in international geopolitics impacts the life circumstances of people and families who come to develop a national consciousness as Palestinians. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought
Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti- Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national- era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
According to one reviewer:
This is an innovative and profoundly interdisciplinary work that reimagines [Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s] cultural, historical, and philosophical landscapes. By introducing the “spiral” as a conceptual framework, Maríñez offers a powerful metaphor for understanding the cyclical, interconnected, and evolving discourses of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This framework captures the fluidity of cultural and historical exchanges, revealing how Afro-Indigenous histories and practices of liberation transcend colonial and racial hierarchies. The book moves decisively beyond Dominican nationalism and anti-Haitian narratives. By bridging Afro and Indigenous histories, Maríñez crafts a narrative of an Afro-Indigenous Caribbean that foregrounds the island’s shared histories of resistance, survival, and cultural exchange. Through her integration of literature, music, history, and philosophy, Maríñez illustrates the transformative potential of [the island’s two countries’] cultural productions, uncovering narratives of resistance and resilience that challenge exclusionary and divisive accounts of the past.... Maríñez’s work offers a bold and transformative vision of the region’s cultural and intellectual possibilities.
Writes Caribbean Philosophical Association’s President Jacqueline Martinez::
In Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Sophie Maríñez offers penetrating insight into how the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been structured as permanent conflict. Maríñez’ examination of the full range of practices, from official documents produced by state governments to oral traditions and spiritual practices, offers readers a new and insightful understanding. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Maríñez’ work with this award.
Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a Professor of French and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her current research lies at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural studies from the Caribbean and its diasporas with a focus on anti-slavery movements, anti-racism, post-colonial/decolonizing thought and aesthetics, collective memories, and cultural productions that challenge dominant notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity. Her first monograph, Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France (2017), examines the work of women writers who addressed gender constructs and misogyny in early modern France through writings and châteaux reaffirming their authority, legitimacy, social status, and political identities. Her research has received multiple grants and fellowships at CUNY, as well as support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2021, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Connecticut. Since 2021, she has also served as Series Editor of the Caribbean Series at Brill.
Born in France to a French mother and a Dominican father, Maríñez grew up in the Dominican Republic, where she earned a degree in Translation. She moved to New York in 1994, raising her two children while pursuing her Ph.D. in French at The Graduate Center, where she graduated with honors in 2010. A recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at BMCC, Maríñez has shaped her work through her immigrant perspective, fluency in French, Spanish, and English, and her earlier professional background as an actress, translator, journalist, and diplomat. Her next project, also funded by the ACLS, examines transatlantic relations between France and Latin America, focusing on the Caribbean during the Cold War.
Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought
Between 1831 and 1833, Stewart’s intellectual productions, as she called them, ranged across topics from true emancipation for African Americans, the Black convention movement, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, Black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for a moral and political theory that is finding new resonance today—insurrectionist ethics.
In this work of recovery, author Kristin Waters examines the roots of Black political activism in the petition movement; Prince Hall and the creation of the first Black masonic lodges; the Black Baptist movement spearheaded by the brothers Thomas, Benjamin, and Nathaniel Paul; writings; sermons; and the practices of festival days, through the story of this remarkable but largely unheralded woman and pioneering public intellectual.
According to one reviewer’s report:
Waters’s book is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing addressing the problem of epistemicide, particularly regarding Black women’s thought. If one looks at much of the literature on Stewart, a common argument that emerges is that most people do not know about Stewart’s ideas due to epistemicide. I admit, as an expert in the field and someone who wrote a dissertation addressing problems in Black Political Thought, I did not know about Maria Stewart prior to reading Waters’s book. As I speak with people, I am quickly realizing the same is the case for other so-called experts in the field. In short, Waters brings us the ideas of Maria Stewart in an extraordinary way. Most of the literature on Stewart has a difficult time approximating Waters’s rigor. Her book effortlessly weaves historical context and philosophy together so that non-experts, as well, can read and understand it. This must be Waters’s magnum opus. Waters [also] demonstrates how Stewart’s thought is connected to the Caribbean world. This makes her book appropriate for honor by our organization despite the fact that its subject was not herself from the Caribbean. It’s clear from Waters’s account that Stewart’s philosophy was shaped by her burgeoning consciousness of what Julius C. Scott, a previous Caribbean Philosophical Association award winner, called The Common Wind. Haitian rebels, Jamaican maroons, and other faraway lands where enslaved people overthrew their masters were impressive to Stewart. They were people and events she learned about during her most productive years in Boston while formulating what clearly became her most directly political thought.
Commenting on this book’s selection for the Fanon Outstanding Book Award, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Jacqueline Martinez writes:
Kristin Waters’s work on Maria Stewart offers readers a penetrating account of Stewart’s intellectual and political tenacity and brings to light the rich and radical projects of liberation that Stewart undertook. Waters’s work allows us to recognize today the long and powerful history of black feminist thought as its bears on the most important political and intellectual issues of our day. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is most pleased to recognize Waters’s work with this award.
Kristin Waters, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Worcester State University in Massachusetts and was a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University for seventeen years. Throughout her professional life she has drawn on disparate resources to disrupt the canons of intellectual history and philosophical thought. Her scholarship explores philosophical works across race and gender, situating them historically and within contemporary global intellectual frameworks. Waters’s edited collection of primary source writings reclaims oppositional discourses reaching back three hundred years. Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations (2000) challenged the still-dominant narrative of Euro- colonial Enlightenment thought and remains one of the few race and gender-inclusive political theory collections.
Through a series of essays by renown scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Brandeis University Press, 2007), co-edited with Carol B. Conaway, brings to light a powerful stream of nineteenth-century thought by writers and activists such as Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells. It was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for best anthology from the Association of Black Women Historians.
Prior to this distinct honor of a Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book award, Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Theory was chosen as one of six finalists for the Pauli Murray Award from the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and has been called “a brilliant intellectual biography…[that examines Stewart’s] political philosophy through the lens of the long tradition of African American feminism” (Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause). Stewart’s thought was shaped by her community in Boston that had strong ties, familial, cultural, and intellectual, both to West Africa and the Caribbean.
Additionally, Kristin Waters has published on the Jamaican adventurer and healer Mary Seacole and has contributed to the development of Insurrectionist Ethics and philosophies of epistemic violence. She is also the author of a play, Aphra Behn: A Women’s Comedy, that addresses the life of the author of Oroonoko (1688), a fact- based fictional account of a captive West African (Akan) prince who is enslaved in Suriname. She has authored many journal articles and book chapters across a wide range of subjects. She credits the Caribbean Philosophical Association and its members for their profound influence on her research and writing.
Frantz Fanon Prize — Previous Recipients
2024
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Chabani Manganyi
Sylvia Marcos
BOOK
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. Sternberg Press, 2022.
Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
Stephon Alexander
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 Press, 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
