Professor Martin Munro, Eminent Scholar and Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University will present a research seminar, ' The Further Adventures of MacFanon' on Monday 1 ^st December, 5-6pm in room 1:24, O'Rahilly Building and online. Please email kate.hodgson@ucc.ie for the Teams link.

All are very welcome.

The contemporary historiography of the Scottish Highlands and Islands has been largely shaped by the work of James Hunter. From his first book,   The Making of the Crofting Community (1976) to his sweeping study of Scottish Highland literature, culture, and the environment,   On the Other Side of Sorrow (1995), Hunter has forged new understandings of the Highland past and its resonances in the present. While he grounds his work in a deep understanding of the Highlands and its cultures and languages, he also is a pioneer in the use of postcolonial thought in relation to the region’s history. In particular, he refers to Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon in his engagement with the Highland past. As the scholar Jim MacPherson puts it, “For Hunter, a crucial element of Fanon and Said’s ideas was their emphasis on the necessity of postcolonial communities knowing their own past in order to throw off the shackles of colonial rule. Hunter’s great innovation was to take these insights, arising from the French Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East, and use them in the Highlands to promote a regional identity which eschews the notion that Highlanders were simply passive victims of an incorporating British state but, instead, had a degree of agency and control over the circumstances in which they lived” (“History Writing and Agency in the Scottish Highlands” (123).

 

This paper engages principally with Hunter’s uses of Fanon, especially the references to   Les Damnés de la terre, and considers whether   Peau noire, masques blancs may have been a more useful work in understanding Highland communities, alienated from language, culture, and knowledge of the past. It also broadens the discussion to think of the possible relevance of other Caribbean thinkers such as Césaire and Glissant to debates about Highland history, especially Glissant’s idea that Martinique is a site of “la colonisation réussie,” a successful, irreversible process of colonization.