{"id":138410,"date":"2023-12-05T01:39:53","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T06:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/?p=138410"},"modified":"2023-12-05T11:32:49","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T16:32:49","slug":"decolonization-dominates-georgetown-international-relations-curriculum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/decolonization-dominates-georgetown-international-relations-curriculum\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Decolonization’ dominates Georgetown international relations curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Decolonization is always a violent event,’ Frantz Fanon, who popularized the term, wrote in 1961<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Georgetown University’s international relations school champions a theory originally proposed for revolutionary violence.<\/p>\n

The Georgetown Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service “was founded in 1919…to prepare the U.S. to engage on the global stage and has been preparing future leaders to make the world safer, more equitable, more prosperous, and more peaceful ever since,” according to its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The school offers<\/a> an “Inclusionary Developmental Series,” the aim of which is to “increase awareness of perpetual colonialism in international development and convene on different topics towards decolonizing the study and practice of international development.”<\/p>\n

The Catholic university’s SFS recently offered a course called “Decolonizing Global Health,” taught by Professors Emily Mendenhall and Claire Standley, which “studied how systemic racism and neocolonialism operate within the sphere of public health,” the school’s website stated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The term “decolonization” was invented or popularized by the Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon, from the former French colony of Martinique, in his 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth.” The first sentence of Fanon’s work<\/a>, in a section called “On Violence,” states, “decolonization is always a violent event.”<\/p>\n

“At whatever level we study it-individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank-decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another,” Fanon (pictured<\/em>) wrote.<\/p>\n

The publisher of the book’s sixtieth-anniversary edition, Grove Atlantic, describes<\/a> it as “a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization.”<\/p>\n

New York University English Professor Robert Young wrote in a description<\/a> for his 2019 course “Frantz Fanon and Decolonization” that Fanon’ was “centrally engaged from the first with this decolonization process and the question of how to achieve it” and that his 1961 work “The Wretched of the Earth” rapidly “became a central text for the Black Panthers in the US.”<\/p>\n

In the wake of in Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, academics took to Twitter in support of Palestinian “decolonization,” The College Fix<\/em> reported<\/a> at the time.<\/p>\n

For example, Texas Tech University education Professor Jairo F\u00fanez-Flores wrote<\/a> on X hours after Oct. 7 attacks that \u201cdecolonization is not a metaphor. It\u2019s about a free Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories. It\u2019s about a Free Palestine. It\u2019s about liberation and self-determination. It\u2019s about living with dignity. DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR<\/p>\n

— Jairo I F\u00fanez-Flores (@Jairo_I_Funez) October 7, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n