CPA Statement on Cancelled Roundtable in Martinique

29 July 2025

Dear CPA Members,

We write to address a matter about which some of you have expressed concern. As you know, we have recently held our annual conference in Martinique, on the occasion of Frantz Fanon's centennial. This was an extraordinarily memorable conference full of vibrant intellectual exchanges, highlighted by hundreds of panelists presenting their excellent research. While we owe a debt to our new and continuing members for making the conference such an excellent one, we above all owe enormous debts to the many Martinicans who worked with us for years to make this event possible. Local communities and individuals in Martinique worked tirelessly to ensure that the town of Le François and the École Primaire Hanétha Vété-Congolo were hosts of the highest possible caliber.

In the several years leading up to the event, we had approached the Fondation Frantz Fanon about collaborating with the CPA in organizing this conference. While the Fondation expressed initial enthusiasm, this was not followed by timely or engaged efforts to collaborate with the CPA. While the Fondation played no part in organizing the conference as a whole, the CPA nonetheless allotted time to the Fondation to hold one plenary panel and one roundtable panel. This included, as well, the CPA paying for hotel rooms for several of the plenary speakers.

Unfortunately, the personal conduct of a member of the Fondation's leadership while in Martinique was not well-received by members of the local community. As the CPA had invited this individual, it reflected very poorly on our organization and had begun to jeopardize the success of the conference. On the occasion of the Fondation's plenary session, this conduct escalated to new heights, in plain view of many members of the public. The degree to which this individual's actions stood in stark contrast to the values of the CPA and undermined the enormous outpouring of labor by the Martinicans who made this conference a reality was too much for us to continue to overlook. This regrettable conduct was in keeping with past conduct observed by CPA members and other Fanon scholars, many of whom had already severed ties with the Fondation for that reason.

The following day, members of the executive board met to discuss the situation. It was decided that the organization needed to cease all collaborations with the Fondation, which included canceling the remaining panel organized by the Fondation which was set to occur during a round of concurrent sessions. The content of the panel had no bearing whatsoever on this decision. Moreover, aside from the list of the participants and very general brief title listed in the program, nothing about the contents of the roundtable was known by the executive board of the CPA, let alone discussed in its deliberations.

At the time this decision was communicated to the Fondation, none of the participants in the scheduled roundtable had attended any of the many dozens of panels at which CPA members had presented their work. Their attendance to the conference had been confined to attending the catered reception on the first night and the Fondation's plenary panel the following night. In short, while the CPA had contributed both organizationally and financially to the Fondation's presence at the conference, that presence had not taken the form of a sincere intellectual engagement with the hundreds of CPA members assembled to present their important intellectual work.

The reasons for the CPA severing its ties to the Fondation, and in turn canceling the remaining panel, were communicated to the Fondation. As these pertained to the conduct of an individual, the CPA leadership did not deem it appropriate or fruitful to make public comment. Nonetheless, in the following days a member of the Fondation elected to circulate first a rumor and then direct accusation that the roundtable had been canceled as an effort to censor its content, asserting that a desire to mute discussion of Palestine was behind the decision.

Our view, when this accusation was circulated, was that its falsity was plainly evident and thus did not merit response. The conference's first night included the organization honoring Rashid Khalidi with the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. Attendees of our opening ceremonies each morning witnessed poems dedicated to Palestine and readings of Palestinian poetry. Our program included two separate panel presentations whose titles explicitly referred to Palestine, and frequent references to Palestine were made by numerous other conference presenters, including members of the CPA's executive board.

We wish the Fondation Frantz Fanon well in its future endeavors. We strongly affirm its right to engage in discourse on Palestine and anti-colonial struggles of every stripe, just as the CPA supported the scholars and activists who traveled to Martinique to present their work on Palestine at our conference. The decision to sever ties with the Fondation was a hard one given the prior collaboration between the two organizations and the close ties between individuals involved in each. We more than welcome the Fondation's leaders making public comments about Fanon's relevance to the Palestinian struggle. That said, it had become very clear that honoring the CPA's values and the local communities who made this conference a success required the difficult choice to break ties with the Fondation. 

Signed,

CPA Executive Board