While Frantz Fanon never wrote on the Palestinian question, his work on violence and colonialism is often evoked in scholarship on Palestine/Israel. Turning to Fanon at this moment for ways to better understand and respond to the Gaza War seems unavoidable. Liberal humanism’s response to Palestinian dehumanization is frequently to call for empathy. At the same time, the image of the victim should also give us pause. This talk asks: Why is it that most people can stand with Palestinians only when they are dead or dying? What does an anti-colonial framework bring to our understanding of Palestinian struggle? What ethical and political responsibilities do we bear in answering these questions?
Dr. Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College, and editor of The Comparatist. His teaching and scholarship engage critical Black studies, the posthuman, and the Palestinian question. Dr. Zalloua’s most recent works include To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian (forthcoming); Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance (2025); The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023); Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021); Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020); Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018).
Discussants:
Dr. Dina Al-Kassim, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
Dina Al-Kassim is a comparative literature scholar who writes on contemporary political subjectivation, sexuality, gender, psychoanalysis and aesthetics in modernist, anti/post/decolonial forms. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010). Co-editor of Postcolonial Reason and its Critique: Deliberations on Gayatri Spivak’s Thoughts (Oxford UP, 2014), Al-Kassim has contributed to numerous journals including Comparative Literature, Camera Austria International, Grey Room, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Interventions, Public Culture, Samyukta, and the volumes Derrida/Deleuze and Islamicate Sexualities. Al-Kassim’s work be found in Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai (WLU Press 2023).
Dr. Priti Narayan, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Priti Narayan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at UBC. Her research focuses on urban dispossession and belonging, informality of land and labour in Indian cities, and the politics of knowledge production. Her writing has been published in academic journals including Antipode, Urban Studies, Dialogues in Human Geography, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, as well as public outlets including The Hindu, The Times of India, and Frontline magazine. Currently, she teaches courses focused on urbanization in the Global South, anti-colonial theory, and community-engaged research. All her academic work is informed by her long-term involvement with and learning from collective struggles for land and housing in Chennai, India.
January 29, 2026
5:30pm-7:00pm
Dodson Room 302, I.K.B. Learning Centre, 1961 East Mall, UBC
This event is held on the ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Registration Required. THIS EVENT IS NOW FULL.
Register Here
Presented in collaboration with the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of English Language and Literatures, the Department of Geography, and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies.
