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2025 marks the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth—psychiatrist, revolutionary, and radical theorist of colonial trauma and liberation. To commemorate this pivotal moment, we invite scholars, artists, activists, and healers to participate in a special centennial symposium: The Body Makes Me Question: 100 Years of Frantz Fanon. This interdisciplinary gathering explores how colonial violence is not only a historical or political reality but also a somatic and psychosocial condition—embedded in bodies, inherited across generations, and lived daily.

Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s radical insights into the racialized body and trauma, this symposium seeks to examine the intersections of decolonization, embodiment, memory, and healing. We ask: How does the colonized body bear witness to historical trauma? In what ways does the body remember what the mind cannot articulate? What does decolonial healing look like when trauma is carried in the nervous system, the skin, the breath?

Join us for an exciting afternoon of creative presentations focused on the body, mind, and Frantz Fanon's life and legacy; followed by a reception, and then performances of Fanon plays from 7:00pm - 9:00pm at Luella Massey Studio Theatre, hosted by the UofT's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS).

Submission Details & Important Dates

In terms of submissions, we welcome presentations, experiential workshops, short performances (<15 minutes), poetry, artwork, and any other creative submissions that engage with (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Art and creative practices focused on the relationship between body and mind
• Reimagining Fanon in clinical practice: psychiatry, therapy, and decolonial care
• Resistance and activism through art, performance, and protest
• Intergenerational trauma and racialized memory
• Indigenous and Global South perspectives on Fanon
• Decolonial therapies and embodied healing practices
• Disability, chronic illness, and Fanon 

Join us as we explore how the body not only makes us question—but also demands a reckoning. As we mark 100 years since Fanon’s birth, we gather not just to remember—but to reimagine. How do we reckon with the body that remembers what history tries to forget? How do we decolonize when the wound is both political and cellular? Let us think, feel, and struggle with Fanon—again.

Deadline for submissions: September 14, 2025

Registration deadline: Monday, October 13, 2025

Symposium event: Friday, October 17, 2025

Event Agenda

12:30pm-1:00pm: Event Sign-In

Location: Room 12-199 on the 12th Floor, Â鶹´«Ã½ (252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON)
 

1:00pm-7:00pm: In-Person Symposium

Location: Â鶹´«Ã½ (252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON)

• 1:00-2:00pm – Introduction, icebreakers, and overview of Frantz Fanon's life
• 2:00-3:30pm – Parallel sessions (presentations and workshops)
• 3:30-3:45pm – Break
• 3:45-4:45pm – Parallel sessions (presentations and workshops)
• 4:45-5:30pm – Creative performances
• 5:30-7:00pm – Reception with food

7:00pm-9:00pm: Fanon-inspired plays

• Location: Luella Massey Studio Theatre (4 Glen Morris Street, Toronto, ON)
• Hosted by: UofT's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS).