MIASA Project: Frantz Fanon on Translation: Psychiatry, Politics and Knowledge Production

Andrea Cassatella obtained his PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2015, where he also served as a Lecturer in Social Sciences in 2015 and 2016. From 2017-2019, he was Assistant Professor of Humanities and Head of the Core Division at Al Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences, Al Quds University in Jerusalem, Palestine. In 2019-2020 Andrea was Research Fellow at Columbia Global Centers | Amman, and a Research Fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, in 2020. Andrea researches and teaches in the area of political philosophy, postcolonial/decolonial thought, as well as religion and politics. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as Community Service Officer for the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees missions in Bosnia Herzegovina and Djibouti. 

At MIASA, Andrea will further extend his previous work on language and politics addressing the significance oftranslation in processes of knowledge production, through an engagement with Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric and political thought. Attentive to questions of race and colonialism, the project questions dominant understandings of translation as a neutral linguistic phenomenon that remains indifferent to inequalities of power, thereby contributing to the globalization of hegemonic knowledge and political forms. The aim is to illuminate the decolonial potential of Fanon’s work to rethink the nature and function of translation in the humanities and social sciences, especially with regard to the formation and renewal of epistemic and political orders.