Jean Khalfa is an unusual figure: a French intellectual who was joint editor of Les Temps Modernes, the famous journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, yet who has spent most of his academic career at Trinity College Cambridge, and a cultural entrepreneur who has organized exhibitions about the Caribbean avant-garde poet and politician Aimé Césaire and the Cuban-born surrealist artist Vifredo Lam. But it is on account of his major contributions to the understanding of Frantz Fanon that we have asked him to take part in our podcasts, for Jean has edited the complete works of Fanon, in two volumes published by La Découverte and in English by Bloomsbury. This involved a quasi-archaeological exploration of Fanon’s incidental writings, his journalism and his writings on psychiatry and his correspondence, much of it previously unpublished.

In our conversation Jean places Fanon’s writings on colonialism in the context of the training he received as a student of psychiatry under the guidance of the Catalan psychiatrist Tousquelles whose work prefigured the revolutions of the 1960s. His experience as a young psychiatrist during a vicious civil war paved the way for writings in which the cultural and supernatural dimensions of resistance would be highlighted. Understanding Fanon the psychiatrist sheds a wholly new light on his ideas about the individual and collective responses of colonized peoples to racialized violence.

Dawn Ades is a world-renowned curator and authority on surrealism. She curated the landmark London exhibition Dada and Surrealism In 1978 and the Art in Latin America show in 1989 and was an advisor to the recent major exhibition Surrealism beyond Borders which was shown in New York (2021) and London (2022). In this conversation she begins by providing an outline of surrealism as a set of ideas and we then discuss its development in Latin America through the travels of André Breton and the Peruvian Cesar Moro, the arrival of various European artists in Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s such as Benjamin Péret and Remedios Varo and how they linked up with great artists like Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera. We even discover that Trotsky and André Breton wrote the Manifesto for a Free and Revolutionary Art also signed by Rivera. The discussion then moves on to Brazil, where the influence of surrealism was felt through to the 1960s and 1970s in the work of sculptor Maria Martins and Helio Oiticica among others.

Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos is Professor of Comparative & Judicial Politics and a Fellow of Nuffield College. He first came to prominence with his book entitled The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms and Capability Building (2020) in which he showed how judges in Mexico, Peru Chile and Argentina came to be influenced both by civil society expertise in the field of human rights and also by international human rights law. The book won prizes from the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. Since then he has published a stream of work and is very much a rising star both in the field of Latin American politics and in political science more broadly.

Our conversation is about the judicialization of politics, or the politicization of the judiciary, a subject which has drawn increasing attention in Latin America as judges have found themselves called upon to adjudicate incases involving corruption and human rights–topics which politicians and soldiers used to keep out of the reach of the courts, but which now are often held to be judiciable by prosecutors or judges. Also, politicians themselves often take their disputes to the courts. As you will discover, once judges are called upon to rule on these issues they get drawn into turbulent waters and to some extent they have to deploy the same tools as politicians in order to protect their independence and their reputations.