2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Martinican anti-colonial scholar and psychiatrist Frantz Omar Fanon. A deeply influential and engaged intellectual, Fanon’s theorisation of racialisation, humanism, colonial domination, and revolutionary violence remain central to current demands of decolonisation as a material reshaping of the world.

This collaborative event with UvA Decolonial Futures Fellow Ahmed Memon, Tilburg Law School 2025 Witteveen Memorial Fellow Anamika Misra, and Black Archives Researcher Phaedra Haringsma, will commence with a screening of Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). The screening will be followed by a discussion that will centre on understanding Fanon's anti-colonial thought and praxis through the perspectives of his contemporaries, Surinamese anti-colonial writer and resistance fighter Anton De Kom and Bolivian indigenous intellectual Fausto Reinaga.

After the screening and discussion, attendees are invited to join a guided tour of The Black Archives by Phaedra Haringsma, as an opportunity to learn more about Suriname and the Netherlands as part of the Black Atlantic.

Ahmed Memon is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the intersections of international law, global governance, history and decolonial theory and practice. Currently he is writing his manuscript Assemblages of Coloniality: Violence in the making of Global Legal Order where he redescribes global governance as an assemblage of coloniality. He is inspired by how sociology, and political geography in the traditions of Indigenous, Black radical, anti-caste and anti-colonial community practice interrupt, negotiate and negate orthodox Eurocentric vocabularies of legal thought. He also engages in grounded practices on decolonizing the university through student-staff partnerships, specifically with the aim of developing anti-racist and anti-sexist approaches and tools for teaching pedagogy, research, and writing about law within academic practice. See Ahmed Memon's LinkedIn or read his academic profile

Anamika Misra is an anti-disciplinary researcher and educator and is currently the 2025 Witteveen Memorial Fellow in Law and Humanities at Tilburg Law School. She earned her PhD at Kent Law School in 2025 and is now a Teaching Associate at Bristol Law School. Her research focusses on the intersection of racial violence, development security, and war using concepts and methods from black studies and decolonial studies. She focusses on how juridification structures the embodiment of beingness in spaces of intensely organised violence using the category of the 'human'. Drawing on the method of 'black study' through the visuality of resistant art, film, and image to disturb and displace the over-represented gaze of the human and its attendant legal regimes, her research foregrounds how the violence of 'humanisation' is negotiated and overcome through practices of living otherwise. She was the 2022-23 Modern Law Review Fellow and has previously held visiting fellowships at Cardiff University Law School and The Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. Until 2021, she was a member of the Decolonise University of Kent student-staff collective where she developed her praxis of liberatory pedagogy.

Phaedra Haringsma is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Amsterdam. She received her master's degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics in 2022. She works as a researcher and guide at The Black Archives. For De Correspondent, she investigated how colonial history shapes today’s societies. In 2025, she published her first book, Verdronken vrijheid. In Verdronken vrijheid, Haringsma uses investigative journalism, oral history, photography and poetry (by Noris Bannafoo) to tell stories of the Saamaka maroons of Suriname.