“Words the Color of Pulsating Flesh”: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Translation

The public is invited to
“Words the Color of Pulsating Flesh”: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Translation
by Vicente L. Rafael (University of Washington)

Part of the KRITIKA KULTURA LECTURE SERIES

To register, visit https://go.ateneo.edu/KKLectureRafael 

Kritika Kultura, in collaboration with the Literary and Cultural Studies Program and Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices, invites you to a lecture titled “‘Words the Color of Pulsating Flesh’: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Translation,” to be delivered by Vicente L. Rafael of the University of Washington. The event will take place on 10 December 2025, 5:00–7:00 PM, at the NGF Conference Room, De la Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

This lecture explores how translation operates within the intertwined realms of the historical, social, and biopolitical, particularly in colonial contexts. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s writings, it examines the necropolitical dynamics of language, race, and decolonization, highlighting how translation underlies both imperial rule and anti-colonial resistance. The discussion situates these insights within the contemporary resurgence of fascism. 

Admission is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please bring a valid ID for campus access. 

ABSTRACT
Gramsci once wrote that translation is always conjunctural, at the crossroads of the historical and the social. It is thus woven into the politics of life, or what some have called the biopolitical. We can see this most clearly in colonial regimes. Imperial rule as well as resistances to it across different linguistic and social groups would be inconceivable without the workings of translation. In this essay, I flesh out this history by looking at specific biopolitical and necropolitical formations in colonial translation found in the writings of Frantz Fanon especially with regard to language, race and decolonization. And I do so against the backdrop of the surge of fascism today.

BIONOTE
Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research and teaching have focused mostly on the comparative political and cultural history of the Philippines, the United States and Southeast Asia.

He is the author most recently of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022). The rest of his books include Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1988/1993); White Love and Other Events in Filipino Histories (2000); The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005); and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (2016), all published by Duke University Press and co-published in the Philippines by Ateneo de Manila University Press.

He also edited Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays in Filipino Cultures (1995) and Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (1999). Rafael also wrote the Introduction to a collection of Nick Joaquin's stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, published by Penguin Classics (2017). 

Rafael also writes, in the Philippines, op-ed columns for Rappler and Philippine Daily Inquirer, and has written, in the US, for The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards both abroad and in the Philippines, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Social Science Research Council Fellowship, a Ford Foundation fellowship, and residencies at the Stanford Humanities Center, University of California, Irvine Humanities Center, East-West Center in Honolulu, and several others. After graduating with a PhD in History and Anthropology from Cornell University, he taught at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of California at San Diego, Stanford University, and currently at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is married to Lila Ramos Shahani.

ABOUT KRITIKA KULTURA
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