Gavin Arnall

Research and Teaching
My research and teaching interests converge at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Trained in Comparative Literature, I specialize in modern and contemporary Latin American and Francophone Caribbean thought and culture. Other areas of expertise include Marxism and psychoanalysis; critical, literary, postcolonial, and translation theory; continental philosophy; and Black and Indigenous Studies.

I am Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and I hold a courtesy appointment with the Department of Comparative Literature. Additionally, I lead the Marxism Lab, an international team of scholars producing collaborative research on the history and actuality of Marxist theory and practice.

My first book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020), sheds light on a persistent but often latent division in Frantz Fanon's writings, a subtle internal struggle between two modes of thinking about change. I argue that, along with the dominant and well-known Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process, there is a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive conception of transformation. To develop this argument, I offer a close and symptomatic reading of Fanon's entire oeuvre, from cannonical texts like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands. 

Subterranean Fanon was selected as an Editor's Pick for the journal EuropeNow,  it was featured in a podcast with the New Books Network, and it was the focus of events sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.

My next book, Translating Universality: Marxism and Indigenous Radicalisms in Latin America, explores past and present (missed) encounters between Marxist and Indigenous worldviews and practices. Key figures for this study include José Carlos Mariátegui, José María Arguedas, Álvaro García Linera, Raquel Gutiérrez, Fernanda Navarro, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Subcomandante Marcos.

Another major project involves working with a team of researchers to update and expand Michael Löwy's canonical anthology Marxism in Latin America.

I am the co-editor of Universality and Translation: Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics (Fordham University Press, 2025) and Between Revolution and Democracy: José Aricó, Marxism, and Latin America (Brill’s Historical Materialism Book Series, forthcoming).  I am also the translator of Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, The Infinite Farewell (Duke University Press, 2018).

I have received fellowships in support of my research from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UM’s University Musical Society, and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. I have served on the Latin American Studies Association's Executive Council of Center Directors (2025-2026) and on the Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association’s Forum on Marxism, Literature, and Society (2017-2022). I was also the faculty mentor of the Marxisms Collective for several years. I currently serve on the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism en español.

Selected Publications

Universality and Translation: Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2025).

Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

"The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator: Approaching Marxism as/in/with Translation from Antonio Gramsci to the Zapatistas," Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory 30, No. 1 (February 2022): 99-132.

"Latin American Marxisms: Reading José Carlos Mariátegui and José Aricó Today," Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, No. 3 (January 2021): 1-11.

"The Missed Encounter of Turupukllay: Marxism, Indigenous Communities, and Andean Culture in Yawar fiesta," Radical Americas 5, No. 1 (2020): 1-16.

"Remembering the Sixties: On Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Time," Modern Language Notes: Spanish Issue 134, No. 2 (March 2019): 360-381.

"Repeating Translation, Left and Right (and Left Again): Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses and Distant Star,"  CR: The New Centennial Review 17, No. 3 (Winter 2017): 237-263.

"Masters without Slaves: Raoul Vaneigem’s Détournement of Nietzsche," Global Anarchisms: No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries, eds. Barry Maxwell and Raymond Craib (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2015), 283-315.

"The Idea(s) of Occupy," Theory & Event 15, No. 2 (June 2012).

"Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière," conducted with Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry 38, No. 2 (Winter 2012): 289 -297.