Tunis Connections: Concatenations and Missed Opportunities, Bond, Fanon, Foucault

Abstract

Reflecting on Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus, a book George Bond and I edited during our work at the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University in the late 1990s, this paper considers the notion of contested terrains, that for George Bond was played out in the scholarship of African studies, in the daily encounters which he had with his colleagues, and in his Zambian research. Bond understood these contestations as continuously operating on and across and often taking place below the surface or at the margins of insititutions. This paper emerged in response to Bond’s invitation to speak about Fanon’s psychiatry writings and Fanon’s critique of sociotherapy on a panel he was organizing at the American Anthropological Association in 2014 (AAA). After he died, the focus shifted to include Bond alongside Fanon and Foucault underscoring the continued need for dialog on the work of three intellectuals—African-American, African Caribbean, and French. The connections and misconnections between Fanon and Foucault is in part the discussion about contested terrains and the willfulness of constructed categories. Indeed, intellectual genealogies, the unknown connections as well as dividing lines was something that interested Bond, the anthrolopologist of the politics of knowledge.