Illuminations, refusals, and liberation: honouring the seminal works of Hussein Bulhan

Professor Hussein Bulhan is a Fanonian, liberation and Somali studies scholar, and Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Conflict Studies. His seminal book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, published in 1985, has been a radical companion for generations of de/anti-colonial thinkers and activists. The book and Professor Bulhan’s other published works on imperialism in the studies of the psyche, black psyches in captivity, stages of colonialism in Africa and occupation of the mind, family therapy in the trenches, ruin and renewal in Somaliland, liberatory subjectivities and the dynamics of cultural in-betweenity, integral to African knowledge archives, are critical reading and thinking resources for students, established scholars, practitioners, and activists. Professor Bulhan has inspired and schooled a generation of black and anti-colonial psychologists-activists. Professor Bulhan has the distinction of having supervised over thirty-five doctoral dissertations at Boston University, USA in the late 1980s. Professor Bulhan has led on the establishment of several independent development and educational institutions. He is the founding President and current Chancellor of the Frantz Fanon University, Hargeisa, Somaliland. Professor Bulhan served as the President/Chancellor of University of Hargeisa, Executive Director of the Institute of Health and Development, Hargeisa, and Founder and Director of the Center for Health and Development, a non-profit organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In the early 2000s he was the 2011-2014 Chief of Staff Counselling and Welfare, UNAMID, Darfur, Sudan. This symposium will celebrate, honour and engage critically with Professor Bulhan’s scholar-activist and development contributions as part of the liberatory project of retrieving and consolidating African and South knowledge archives.

Bulhan’s Legacy as Abolitionist Register and Colonial Disruption

by Prof Lara Sheehi

In this talk I will ground the symposium in Bulhan’s intellectual and clinical legacy, taking up especially his seminal Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. In doing so, I will highlight how Bulhan’s work can be interpreted through an abolitionist register—one that early on attempted to underscore what academic and abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, reminds us: “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments, and possibilities… [it is] building the future from the present, in all the ways we can.” (2018) In focusing on “third world people” and offering a piercing analysis and counter-register to white supremacist, Eurocentric frameworks that continue to haunt psychology well after his 1985 intervention, we can understand Bulhan’s work as the very pieces and possibilities of which Gilmore speaks. More specifically, in leading us through and offering alternatives out of our “shared predicament of captivity”, Bulhan offered an inversion of where one must begin to reimagine and enact an anti-oppressive clinical, psychological, and political praxis. That is, one must begin with Fanon. Decades later, Bulhan’s work can continue to help us disrupt coloniality and presence Fanonian possibilities for the study and practice of psychology.

Against the Colonial Republic of Psychoanalysis:  Hussein Bulhan, Fanon and “Rest of the World”

by Prof Stephen Sheehi

In 1985, Hussein Bulhan’s Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of the Oppressed compelled psychoanalysis to confront the constitutive violence of its universalizing mission. In the hands of Bulhan, the implications and conclusions within Fanon’s most radical liberatory theories and realizations emerge in full force. In this presentation I explore more than “a superficial look at establishment psychology—its diverse theories, profusion sanctioned theories and techniques [that] serve to justify the status quo of oppression and are used as instruments of social control.” Rather, in debt and gratitude to Bulhan, I map the “psychic sovereignty” claimed by, what Lara and I have called elsewhere, “the colonial Republic of Psychoanalysis.” Starting with the IPA’s Constitution, codified in Jerusalem in 1977, that divides the provinces (and providence) of psychoanalysis and the IPA into Europe, North America (North of the United-States-Mexican border), all America south of that border; and “the rest of the world,” I consider how psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts and their institutions police the sovereignty of racialized and minoritized subjects, especially those of the Global South. I explore how psychoanalysis as a normative, disciplinary method and practice administers sovereignty over the internal worlds of black and brown people globally. In extending the psychic universality of the “globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man.”, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, to “the rest of the world,” psychoanalysis and its liberalism designates not only who is perverse and who is deviant, who are genuinely good and bad objects, but pathologizes resistance to the hegemony of racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism as not worthy of the privileges of this ethnoclass of “Man”. Moreover, learning from Fanon and Bulhan’s exploration of his oeuvre, I invite participants also to consider how this universalized sovereignty over the psychic  and internal worlds of “the rest of the world” -namely the bodies and minds of Arabs, Muslims, black people, the disabled, and queer and trans folks –are invited “innocently” into the globally hegemonic ethnoclass  to collude with psychoanalysis’ roles in regulating and enforcing white supremist, cis-hetero-normativity.

Date: 10 October 2023, Thursday

Time: 13h30 – 15h30 SAST

Venue: Emperors Palace Convention Centre, Venue 8

Convenor: Mohamed Seedat, Emeritus Professor, University of South Africa

Raconteur: Hussein Bulhan, Professor/President, Frantz Fanon University, Somaliland