MAPPING FANON is a digital humanities project created by Akrish Adhikari, currently a faculty member of French at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. The project aspires to provide readers of Fanon digital access to Josie and Frantz Fanon’s library, which contains books with annotations, and is currently housed in the Centre National de Recherche Préhistorique Anthropologiques et Historique in Algeria. In addition, MAPPING FANON plans to disseminate short research findings on Fanon—including evolving research on Josie Fanon.
A significant part of this project is committed to bringing Josie Fanon’s life and thought to the research agenda of Fanon studies. Josie, who has been thoroughly ignored by Fanon scholars, has only recently become a subject of study in her own right—despite her three-decade record as a translator, journalist, and interviewer. For instance, see this article by Jessica Breakey, who is working on a larger research project on Josie. Stay also tuned for a forthcoming article from New Literary History, which considers Josie’s contributions to the “writing” of Frantz’s thought as his amanuensis. In this regard, MAPPING FANON means to understand how Josie “mapped” his thought out in writing.
Currently in serious development is also a catalog of all of Josie’s writing and translation work, found in the archives of newspapers such as El Moudjahid as well as in collections such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.