Frantz Fanon and the Question of Palestine – a lecture by Dr. Zahi Zalloua

Frantz Fanon and the Question of Palestine – a lecture by Dr. Zahi Zalloua

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). 

Brenna Bhandar

Brenna Bhandar wearing a light collared shirt


Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law
Email: bhandar@allard.ubc.ca

Prior to joining the Allard School of Law at UBC in 2021, Brenna Bhandar was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa). She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), and a research associate at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London and a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.

Research Area:

Dr. Brenna Bhandar’s research and teaching lie within the fields of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. She is the author or editor of 4 volumes, including  Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-authored book of interviews (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought published in 2020 with Verso. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, German and Italian.

Dennis Britton


Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literatures
Email: dennis.britton@ubc.ca

Dr. Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion.

He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” He is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Difference on the Early Modern English Stage and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England.

Research Area: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures, the History of Race, Critical Race Theory, Protestant Theology, the History of Emotion