UC Berkeley

My dissertation project, “Tending the End of the World: Etel Adnan and Frantz Fanon,” stages an encounter between Martinican-Algerian revolutionary, thinker and clinician, Frantz Fanon (1921-1961) and Arab-American poet and painter Etel Adnan (1921-2021) to elaborate on pansement as a Fanonian structure of redress that centers a poetics of invention in rupture with the colonial order as world. Pansement—binding, or tending, in English—is a poetico-political structure of redress that transforms and restructures the contours of national culture amidst and against the interminable violence of the colonial condition that persists even as it is transformed in the (post)colony. I read Fanon’s political and clinical writings alongside Adnan’s apocalyptic poems written amidst war and destruction, specifically Jebu (1971), The Arab Apocalypse (1981), and “To Be in a Time of War” (2003), to articulate the nature of Fanonian structures of redress under conditions that are considered catastrophically terminal. Adnan and Fanon’s works center the interminable condition of war besieging the subjects and territories of the Arab region and the world as colonial inheritance and as neocolonial condition in formally independent nation-states. At the same time, their writings crystallize the unraveling and promissory rupture of decolonization as a transformative upheaval of the historicity and racial humanism that subtends colonial modernity and its discursive order. In foregrounding Fanon’s elaboration of pansement, I consider the insistence of poeisis as a destructive-creative form in the Fanonian structure of redress that is transformative of national culture. Ultimately, the dissertation methodologically transforms Fanon’s formulation of pansement into a reading practice that centers the “total disorder” required for disclosing unforeseen, heretically incommunicable, yet consequential and interruptive interventions in critical thinking, necessary amidst unrelenting postcolonial devastation, and carries out experiments in that reading practice through the texts of Etel Adnan.