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Professorial Inaugural Lecture - Professor Azzedine Haddour: Colonial Biopolitics
07 May 2025, 5:30 pm–8:00 pm
Colonial Biopolitics: A Politics of Health Which Kills and Cures. Come explore how colonial powers have used health as a tool for control and resistance at our event on May 7th!
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
School of European Languages and Culture
Location
-
Gustave Tuck Lecture TheatreGower StreetLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
This lecture examines the interconnections between the development of modern France’s republican and democratic institutions, the rise of the Second Empire, and the colonisation of Algeria. In its aftermath, biopolitics took on a distinctly colonial character, merging social welfare with the management of surplus populations deemed threats to social hygiene. This convergence of social and colonial policies profoundly shaped France’s political and legal frameworks. Beyond influencing colonial governance, biopolitics had a devastating impact on Algerian society. It established a racialised healthcare system that decimated the native population and imposed a political structure akin to apartheid. Colonial biopolitics not only ravaged Algerian society but also undermined the foundations of France’s republican institutions, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Algerian War.
About the Speaker
Professor Azzedine Haddour
Professor of Postcolonial and Comparative Literature at UCL
Azzedine Haddour is Professor of Postcolonial and Comparative Literature. His specialism in Francophone studies combines critical and cultural theory with literature, history, and politics. He is the author of Frantz Fanon, Gender, Torture and the Biopolitics of Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, Postcolonialism and the Ethics of Difference and Colonial Myths: History and Narrative, editor of City Visions and The Fanon Reader, translator of a collection of Sartre’s essays, Colonialism and Neocolonialism and author of various articles on Fanon and postcolonial theory.
More about Professor Azzedine Haddour