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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
This book situates the nuanced intervention of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa within the international conjuncture of anti-colonial thought and decolonization. It argues that the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its urgent political focus, should also be read as a philosophical intervention on the problem of Man that haunts the idea of race. As Steve Biko once famously said, apartheid will end; the real question is what comes after apartheid.
Maurits van Bever Donker argues that the Black Consciousness Movement found intellectual and conceptual allies in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, tracing the problem of race as foundational to what is called ‘the script of Man’ and, in the process, inventing the possibility of a new sense of Man, one with ‘a more human face’. While the work of figures like Biko, Fanon and Césaire tends to be read as discrete political texts in a broader field of negritude and radical black thought, Texturing Difference explores what becomes possible when this network of texts is read from the perspective of South Africa. This intervention has significance, not only for how race is approached and understood in South Africa, but for the global workings of race in our time.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Note on Orthography
Foreword – Nadia Yala Kisukidi
Notes
Introduction
The peculiarity of a question
Texturing difference
The grammar of community
The script of Man
Ending the game: Indigeneity, tactility
The encounter of blackness
Notes
1 Community
This community, among those
I
Legislating community
A communal freedom?
II
After apartheid, reading the limit
The claim of community
Notes
2 Scripting Man
Abiding by limits: Motility
Scripting Man: World citizen
A question of judgement
The function of race
The motile edge: Indigeneity and tactility
Notes
3 Indigeneity
The work of poetry
Traversing indigeneity
Culture and colonialism
Notes
4 Tactility
Metaphysics of blackness
On lived experience
In the storm
Reading the damned, holding the future
Notes
5 Black Consciousness Philosophy
A question of freedom
Reading Black Consciousness
A philosophy of encounter
Encountering freedom
A life …
Notes
References
Books
Articles and Chapters
Lectures, Speeches, Archival Documents
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Mário Pinto de Andrade,
The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Maurits van Bever Donker,
Texturing Difference
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi and Aaron Kamugisha,
The Caribbean Race Reader
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and ‘Whiteness’
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Malcolm Ferdinand,
Decolonial Ecology
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián,
On Tropical Grounds
Ailton Krenak,
Life is Not Useful
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
The Politics of Time
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
To Write the Africa World
Valentin Y. Mudimbe,
The Scent of the Father
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Suely Rolnik,
Spheres of Insurrection
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Javad Tabatabai,
Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
Texturing Difference
‘Black Consciousness Philosophy’ and the ‘Script of Man’
Maurits van Bever Donker
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Maurits van Bever Donker 2025
The right of Maurits van Bever Donker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Foreword translation copyright © Polity Press, 2025
Excerpts from BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS by Frantz Fanon. English translation copyright © 2008 by Richard Philcox. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Excerpt from AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE by Cheikh Hamidou Kane. English translation copyright © 1963 by Katherine Woods. Used courtesy of Melville House Publishing, LLC.
Excerpt from page 22 of NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND © 2001 by Aimé Césaire, translated by Clayton Eshleman, and edited by Annette Smith. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6229-9 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6230-5 (paperback)
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Acknowledgements
In the strongest sense this book is an exercise in learning to read as a method of learning to learn from below. This is a practice, or a disposition of abiding, that I have learned and am still learning from figures like Joan Scott, Hortense Spillers, Valentine Y. Mudimbe, Gayatri C. Spivak, Sylvia Wynter and Qadri Ismail. Their interventions walk with me, as it were, on the way to study. When I embarked on my doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota (UMN), fresh from completing a dissertation under the direction of Premesh Lalu at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) on the turn to ‘play’ in historiography’s attempts to come to terms with Nongqawuse and the cattle-killing episode in the nineteenth-century history of Xhosa dispossession, it was with Qadri that I began my movement between the historical and the literary, so as to stay with the trouble of subjectivation as this weighs on us. I arrived with a sense that there is much to learn from attending to the text, and the undivulged moments in it, of Black Consciousness. I hope to have been adequate to it.
It was in a class on modernism at UMN, with Jani Scandura and Lois Cucullu, where I first read Aimé Césaire alongside Jacques Derrida (whom I was reading in another class), stumbling on the proximity of their common critique. They are, of course, not the same, but this proximity led me to begin to read interventions that had for so long been proffered as only political, along the lines of their theoretical and philosophical articulations. Later, through reading Nahum Dimitri Chandler on Dubois, I grasped the urgent need to read against the weight of the Euro-American episteme’s tendency to defend itself through a strategic essentialism of its own, where race or gender marks the writer as anti-X, rather than as offering a re-conceptualization of the grounds of the episteme.
The hands that have helped shape this text are myriad. I would like to begin by thanking Berni Searle, whose artwork ‘Lifeline’ is on the cover, for graciously allowing its use, and for the formative intervention that her work has had for the shaping of how I read the body, its scripts, and the grids of intelligibility through which these are threaded. There are so many to whom I will remain forever grateful for the generosity of their instruction and their friendship: Tom Pepper, Gary Minkley, Nicky Rousseau, Patricia Hayes, Ciraj Rassool, Charlie Sugnet, Leslie Witz, Tony Brown, Andrew Bank, Jani Scandura, Simona Sawhney, Ajay Skaria, Eric Sheppard, Crain Soudien, Annemarie Lawless, Adam Sitze, Okechukwu Nwafor, Paige Sweet, Diane Detournay, Anna Selmeczi, George Agbo, Charles Kabwete and Robert Davies. The enabling environment of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change, directed by Karen Brown, deserves a special mention. John Mowitt, Cesare Casarino and Nancy Luxon have become important and valued interlocutors through this project and beyond. Katherine Wallerstein, Patricia Parker, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez, Amit Chaudhuri and Rocia Zambrana all sat through hours of conversation around this book in Santiago, and helped me imagine its possible futures. Pablo Oyarzun and Andrés Claro, through their Global Humanities Institute on Translation, allowed me to explore how this work of reading might travel, opening doors to friendship and theory across the south. Several of the arguments in this book were tested in the CHR, ICGC, Fort Hare University Annual Winter School. The generosity of colleagues, guests and fellows, in reading and hearing is, in my view, unmatched.
Space doesn’t allow for proper thanks. This book would not have been possible without the support of my colleagues, friends and interlocutors at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC: Premesh Lalu, Heidi Grunebaum, Ross Truscott, Lwando Scott, Michelle Smith, Jane Taylor, Valmont Layne, Thozama April, Lauren van der Rede, Aidan Erasmus, Riedwaan Moosage, Fernanda Pinto de Almeida, Lee Walters, Lameez Lalkhen and Miceala Felix. Karina M. Brink has lent her careful eye to clarifying and editing the text. The series editors at Polity, especially Leticia Sabsay, have been phenomenally supportive in receiving and guiding my text, and the attention of Helena Heaton in shepherding it this far has been impeccable. The careful and thoughtful responses by my anonymous reviewers helped to refine and strengthen the argument, a gift for which I am immeasurably grateful. No one has carried the burden of completing this text quite as much as Kirstin, Jesse, Avila and Axel. This book is for you.
A few small sections of Chapter 1 were published in a chapter ‘Producing Concepts for the Possibility of Freedom’ that appeared in Gomes, C. and Abreu, C. (eds), Public Humanities: Thinking Freedom in the African University, CODESRIA, 2022; as well as in ‘Interrupting, the Human: Imagining Freedom’ in van Bever Donker, M. and Scott, L., (eds) Afrika Focus. Special Issue: ‘Transformative Constitutionalism: What Human?’ 36 (2023): 41–57. Parts of the third chapter found its way to this book from an introduction to a special issue I co-edited with Ross Truscott, ‘What is the University in Africa for?’ in Truscott, R. and van Bever Donker, M. (eds), Kronos: Journal of South African Histories. Special Issue on ‘What is the University in Africa for?’ And passages in the final chapter, from an essay ‘Ethical Injunctions: UWC in the Face of the “Here and Now”’ in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 38 (1) (2012).
This book was supported by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. My thanks notwithstanding, all errors and shortcomings that remain in the book are my own.
Note on Orthography
In Texturing Difference the lower case ‘b’ is used for ‘black’, in distinction from the now commonplace use of a capitalized ‘B’. As is argued in Texturing Difference, the use of the term ‘black’ in the broader philosophical intervention of black consciousness is a strategic laying hold of what is given as a racial marker so as to undo the work of race in the world. The use of the minor letter is to work against the weight that would make the designation ontologically proper to the subject. At the same time, the lived experience of race in the world, and especially for those designated or self-designating as ‘Black’, has a weight that is often registered as ontological. Following Biko, it is this weight that orders, in all the senses of this term, the philosophical intervention to produce a new world, to abide with and to invent the new, that might give us, as Césaire phrased it, ‘a more human face’. The minor letter, then, is an invitation to read this intervention with me, that we might as Fanon phrased it, ‘just touch the other’.
Foreword‘Politics of Souls, Politics of Bodies’Nadia Yala Kisukidi
What would a society free from oppression look like? And, crucially, how can we conceive of such a society in a way that not only brings it into being but also ensures that in doing so, we don’t trigger a new cycle of the very violence we aim to eliminate? In spite of the urgency of these questions, theory tends to give only a muted response.
We’ve grown suspicious of discourses that frame social transformation as a matter of respecting human dignity. In Europe, utopias built on such a promise failed throughout the twentieth century. As a result, our efforts are now directed at producing critical analyses of how oppression and violence affect subjectivity rather than envisioning what a different future might look like. The science of misery promises no way out of misery, and even criticizes any attempt to think beyond it as naive. However, we must believe that conditions can change and alternatives exist – not just to keep hope alive against all odds, but because our existence, the very possibility of life itself, is at stake.
These challenges intensify when we confront the issue of combating racism. How can we envision a world rid of racism – a world rid of the politics of oppression that determines the fate of marginalized bodies, of bodies marked by alterity. What can our political imagination achieve when it’s shackled by the very categories from which it is trying to break free?
When we take on the question of race, we encounter a distinctive set of challenges that stem from the nature of the struggle against racism itself. Indeed, racism’s use of the concept of ‘race’ as a deadly weapon has also created an unprecedented opportunity: it allowed the very people it oppressed to reclaim ‘race’ as a refuge in their struggle. ‘Race’ has become, paradoxically, a sanctuary for those targeted by racism and, even more, a symbol of their rise. At the very heart of anti-racist struggles it is possible to witness the transformation of hostility into hospitality. The hostis, by becoming a host, becomes hospitable. Hospitality, hostility, and ‘hostipitality’, these three terms, brought together (and the third coined) by Jacques Derrida,1 provide an overview of the history of the political uses and abuses of racial signifiers.
‘Nègre I am, Nègre I’ll always be.’2 Césaire’s bold statement stands as a radical expression of anti-racism, one that doesn’t call for the suppression of the terms of hostility – ‘nègre’ or ‘black’. The word ‘nègre’ – used to designate a race – confronts racism head-on. But perhaps there’s a finer point here: when the signifier ‘black’ or ‘nègre’ is reclaimed and pronounced in the first person, it works to negate ‘race’ itself. The signifier ‘black’ is no longer a sign of subjugation, which is only effective when mediated by the white gaze, but a force unto itself that can reshape the future, a future untainted by the hatred that reifies and demeans bodies. ‘Black’, used as rallying cry rather than a racial designator, offers a new political semiotics by transforming the grammar and semantic structure of the world.
As we navigate the political imaginations that combat racism, we must learn, then, to accept the discomfort of aporias and paradoxes. Anti-racism doesn’t simply abandon a racial – or seemingly racial – lexicon. And, when we believe we’re hearing the idioms of ‘race’, as well as the various forms of hatred and insult long associated with them, we might actually be witnessing the construction of a new grammar, one that projects a shared paradise beyond racial lines. We must be attentive to this when probing the utopian visions of radical black traditions. They’re not just casually flipping negative stereotypes on their heads in an effort to question the social practice of reappropriating insults in a context structured through liberalism. Instead, they’re building a politics of justice, one that works as ‘an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle’.3
The semiotics of blackness isn’t structured around a perpetually fetishized white gaze, which reduces non-white identities to a state of non-being. Black can’t be seen as the simple negation of white, as merely a differential sign. The semiotics of blackness also point to a utopian space, freed from racial violence: the term ‘black’ carries us towards another world – one that, by rejecting what is, makes us aware of the possibility of what has yet to emerge. Thus, racial signifiers, when reclaimed by those they were meant to suppress, often lose their racial charge and, in an act of self-abolishment, pave the way for new forms of utopian writing. This is what négritude means for Césaire (and perhaps for Senghor as well): the ‘great black cry’ [le grand cri nègre] may signal the end of racism and the concept of race. ‘Black’ doesn’t belong to the master’s vocabulary; it therefore shouldn’t be discarded in the name of a colour-blind ideal of humanity. Rather, it’s a ‘miraculous weapon’ that has the power to create what centuries of violence could not suppress: a world with a human face.
This cry isn’t just about turning a fresh page in humanism’s history, aiming to be more ‘inclusive’ and attentive to the Other, their body, their skin. It’s about closing a chapter on a particular kind of humanism – the one born in modern Europe, which claimed humanity as the supreme value, while simultaneously denying it to those beyond its own borders whom it sought to conquer. The real scandal lies in the fact that this universal unity was achieved through the dispossession of others and the imposition of an unassailable asymmetry. Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of this in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Decolonization exposes the ‘striptease of [European] humanism’.4 As Sartre made clear, ‘the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters’.5 Moving beyond colonialism and its inherent racism, then, is not a discursive matter that consists of refurbishing old concepts. There’s no flawed concept of universality to fix, no cracks in humanism to patch up to make it, as Senghor might say, ‘whole’. We must set sail, leaving behind a continent, with its own arsenal, its own philosophies, and, rejoining the ‘slaves and monsters’, think from other shores.
Maurits van Bever Donker’s Texturing Difference expresses this continental displacement in philosophical form. It does indeed set sail in search of a space that has yet to emerge, seeking a world that needs no barbaric other, no savage alterity, against which others define their humanity.
In South Africa, the landscape was fractured by colonial racism and white supremacy. Emerging in the folds of violence, utopian dreams took shape, forcing the past, present and future to intersect and contend with one another. How do we end apartheid? How can we invent a future community? How do we counter colonial narratives – white narratives – about Africa’s past? How do we construct a radically different community that doesn’t unwittingly reinforce the very racial and identity divisions that laid the conceptual groundwork for the policy of ‘separate development’ instituted in 1948?
Utopia is often just an exalted name for survival – or rather its inscription, its own form of writing. Texturing Difference seeks to decipher this writing, like it would a code, a secret correspondence that eludes interception and interpretation by any authority. It aims to uncover both a text, issued like a call to arms, and a texture, the very fabric that imbues it with historical – and corporeal – weight, and inscribes it in a situation. This last term should be understood in a Sartrean sense, evoking the ‘set of inherited conditions’6 from which freedom, though bound and trapped by these very conditions, emerges as though in defiance of them. The coming society requires a total negation of everything that made apartheid possible – its structural conditions, its ghosts, its ideologies, the psychology that gave rise to it and which it, in turn, nourished, as well as the ever-present danger that it might resurface. By dismantling the delusional and destructive constructs of white racism, we give the world ‘a more human face’.7
The black consciousness movement provided the signs of such a utopian writing under the apartheid regime. This writing is particularly pronounced in Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, a collection of texts published, sometimes clandestinely, between 1969 and 1977. Steve Biko was killed by the South African police on 12 September 1977. His writings are a testament to the diverse methods of black resistance to apartheid. In Texturing Difference, Maurits van Bever Donker offers a guide for reading them, for deciphering their signs. What emerges is a ‘philosophy’, ‘a practice of reading and invention’. Black consciousness philosophy unfolds within an ecology of struggles and concepts, a complex interplay of theoretical, political and spiritual forces from the likes of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and James Hal Cone, fusing together Caribbean, Pan-African and African American influences. The waters of the black Atlantic spill over into Biko’s writings, where bodies and ideas circulate freely and where liberation movements fighting against slavery and demands for independence on the continent converge. It is a question of inventing what has yet to exist: an open society that will arise in the wake of apartheid’s abolition. This act of creation doesn’t follow a plan or program, but it does require, a minima, a rewriting of humanity, a new script that sharpens our awareness of physical sensations, of the presence of bodies, of the interlacing of subjectivities, of the reciprocity between the ‘We’ and the ‘I’, with the former refusing to absorb the latter, and the latter resisting the urge to separate itself from the former. Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang (‘a person is a person because of other people’), wrote the poet and anti-apartheid activist Jeremy Cronin in Sesotho. Van Bever Donker reminds us that in 1976, when Cronin spent seven years at Pretoria Central Prison, prisoners could only see the bodies and faces of other inmates by holding a mirror beyond the bars of the prison windows. Black fists raised in solidarity and freedom – an expression of resistance to the anonymity imposed by forced isolation.
This rewriting of the human belongs to a singular genre, as it must at all times grapple with that which threatens its conceptual existence, namely, the assertion of the non-conceptual (the body), which troubles the very possibility of all philosophical discourse. It must repeatedly call on what Adorno referred to as ‘the disenchantment of the concept’.8 Van Bever Donker performs such a disenchantment by pitting Biko against Kant and by presenting the philosophy of black consciousness as a counter to the hollow core of humanist philosophy.
Drawing on Biko, van Bever Donker reminds us that, under apartheid, the real evil is white racism, which entails structuring the world around the opposition between whiteness and blackness. In this world, being white represents the norm for humanity, while being black – that is, a lesser human – means being only a body. The colour of one’s skin determines who holds power and who is dispossessed of it as a new form of governance over bodies is forged. As Biko makes clear, ‘racism does not only imply exclusion of one race by another – it always presupposes that the exclusion is for the purposes of subjugation’.9
The writing and/or script that allows us to escape the structure of subjugation is not driven by inclusion. Inclusion is not necessarily in contradiction with the act of exclusion. It can even hasten its repetition rather than interrupt its cycle. Texturing Difference offers a deep and thoughtful engagement with this critique of the liberal position against apartheid, a critique that is at the core of Biko’s writings. The legal notion of inclusion, which champions a liberal approach to diversity as both a means and an end, strengthens the very principle of exclusion it is meant to combat. The liberal position advocates for the inclusion of non-whites within a normative space, which, by design, presupposes their negation. An inclusive and diverse space doesn’t automatically abolish the privileges tied to skin colour. Merely calling for legal and political equality ‘irrespective of race’ doesn’t create a society where everyone is truly equal. A genuinely human society doesn’t arise by simply placing those who have historically seen themselves – and continue to see themselves – as superior alongside those who have had to fight against their own marginalization. Inclusion does not repair injustice; real justice abolishes the very structure that produces the division between white and black, the system where black people are never individuals in their own right but only represent the negative value of whiteness. True diversity is neither inclusive nor liberal; it assumes a meeting of equals, face-to-face, on a horizontal plane, where whiteness isn’t everything, and blackness isn’t negated. Ending apartheid in a political, existential and metaphysical sense means working towards this face-to-face encounter. It doesn’t require erasing blackness; rather, it requires black individuals to recognize and assert their existence independently of how they are framed by the white gaze.
Texturing Difference reminds us of how Biko was criticized for his race-based perspective. It also emphatically underscores what is really at stake in Biko’s reflections: a rewriting of the human and an amplification of Césaire’s resolute affirmation, ‘Nègre I am, nègre I’ll always be.’
It’s worth pausing for a beat and changing the tempo. Let’s take a moment to consider the many odd questions addressed to me unthinkingly as soon as I refer to myself in the first person as ‘black’. Is this term outdated? Shouldn’t the goal of emancipatory thinking be to envision the world beyond the categories of black and white? Isn’t ‘black’ a word beholden to the violent logic of modernity? Isn’t using a ‘name’ in the first person that was invented by others for the express purpose of demeaning and denying me a perfect illustration of alienation?
Texturing Difference finds a way to short-circuit these persistent and pernicious questions. Any response that doesn’t entail ceasing to use the term ‘black’ will, after all, be deemed inadequate by those who ask these questions. But, in societies steeped in racism, we are compelled to use it. To deny the possibility of its utterance is to violate this implicit obligation.
The philosophy of black consciousness offers a theoretical engagement with this obligation, which implies a rewriting of the human. We need to move away from thinking of humanity as a mere logical structure or an endlessly expandable concept.10 We cannot add or subtract any subset of its parts, altering one’s ontological status in relation to their inclusion or exclusion. Human reality isn’t validated by broadening our conceptual boundaries. It is validated through praxis. And this praxis takes the form of an encounter, one that happens face-to-face between Subjects with a concrete position in the world. No one should refuse themselves this, no one should believe their morphology is fixed by divine will. A meaningful human encounter, the foundation for true diversity, doesn’t erase colour; instead, it undermines the governance of bodies where skin colour is linked to power. In this encounter white people won’t see blacks as slaves and blacks won’t regard white people as masters to be feared. Race doesn’t inform this new vocabulary, which refuses to classify or rank and which brings together more than it separates. Emerging in the folds of violence, it serves as a prelude to any human encounter.
The human only exists in the space where its conceptualization is impossible, that is, its existence depends on the concrete acts that set bodies and societies in motion. Anything else is either a repetition of violence rooted in exclusionary practices (humanity dragging in its wake a horde of sub-humans), or a series of lofty rationalizations that, however generous they may be, fail to materialize, leaving people mired in pessimism and melancholia (what is the Kingdom of Ends, where every action aligns with a noble idea, if not a materially impossible fantasy?).
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes the process of decolonization in terms that have since become familiar: ‘Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.’11
Under colonial rule, the colonized are dispossessed of their ‘I’. Similarly, under apartheid, black people are reduced to an objectified corporeality. The black body doesn’t even possess the qualities of a proper body, as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, namely a lived body, which becomes individualized in its relationship to the world. Instead, the black body is perpetually claimed by others. As such, it never appears as being inhabited, as being mine. A mere collection of muscles and tendons, it becomes part of the machinery of exploitation and capital accumulation. ‘Look! A Negro!’12 exclaims a little white boy upon seeing Fanon: the racist insult denies the possibility of any common ground, any intimate connection. The thing-body is an unreclaimable tomb, devoid of life.
To carry your body like a tomb – lifeless, soulless, unconscious. An object – made of skin, flesh – that forever belongs to the other and their limitless power, never to yourself. Racism forces you to live with the weight of your own grave, as a body that suffocates consciousness like a vault.
There are two potential exit strategies to escape a system structured entirely on the violence of racism, each of which takes a metaphysical approach: a politics of the body and a politics of the soul. The second, though less immediately perceptible, calls for a profound release, a separation: letting go of the body as you would a burden and living a truly human life by forsaking the texture of the world. This has nothing to do with the turned cheek of resignation; on the contrary, such a withdrawal bears the seeds of revolution. Texturing Difference doesn’t follow this radical spiritual path. Instead, in the manner of Biko, it advances a politics of the body. This approach calls for a different kind of separation: to remove the body that endures suffering from the body that inflicts it. Bodies must heal themselves from the harm endured or from the harm they’ve caused. Detachment of this sort is aligned with a philosophy of responsibility and freedom. The Black Consciousness Movement is not a movement of redemption: it doesn’t seek to save or forgive those who cause harm. It aims, rather, to prepare the physical, psychological and social conditions for a genuinely human encounter, against the backdrop of a primary, irreparable violence. ‘Black’ becomes the name of a community of empowerment and care – a care provided by those who, by treating their own wounds, develop the knowledge for their own healing.
The coming society has yet to arrive but the conditions for its imminent arrival are decipherable, knowable. This much is clear in the utopian writing that Maurits van Bever Donker decodes for us as he pores over the pages of the Black Consciousness Movement. This writing opens up a space for unrestrained political imaginations, for those who, ‘with an ear to the ground’, can hear ‘the approach of Tomorrow’.13
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
Notes
1
Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000).
2
This is also the title of the book in which Aimé Césaire’s affirmation appears. The title of the English translation is
Resolutely Black
. See the translator’s note on the challenges of translating the term ‘nègre’.
Translator’s note
, Césaire (2020).
3
Robinson (2000 [1983]), p. xxx.
4
Sartre (2004 [1969], p. lvii.
5
Ibid., p. lviii.
6
See the glossary in Barot (2011), p. 399; see also Sartre (1943), p. 546.
7
Biko (2010), p. 47.
8
Adorno (2007), p. 11.
9
Biko (2010), p. 97.
10
Bergson (2008).
11
Fanon (1969 [1961]), p. 2.
12
Fanon (2008 [1952]), p. 89.
13
Césaire (2017), p. 85. Translation modified.
It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: ‘When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.’ And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Introduction
At its core, Texturing Difference is a book about the problem of race as it structures the world, and about a philosophical response to this. It is not, however, a book about escape. Rather, it asks what a freedom that comes after race might look like, and what is involved in ordering a terrain on which such a freedom could arrive. It reads this through the lens of Black Consciousness in South Africa. However, while the dominant modes of engaging with Black Consciousness have approached it through the frame of biography and history, an approach that tends to read it as a political project of racial difference operative as a stage within the confines of what we might think of as the national liberation struggle in South Africa. In this book, I argue that Black Consciousness needs to be attended to as a philosophy, as a practice of reading and invention. In doing so, I place Black Consciousness into conversation with a much broader text – a text that includes negritude, critical and post-phenomenological theory and philosophy, as well as modern political theory. This reading comes from South Africa, as a point of view, adding depth to a framing of the problem of race that is often grasped through the lens of the middle passage and the experience of slavery and race in the Americas. I follow the interventions of other critical readers, like Gary Wilder in his Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World and Sylvia Wynter in her consideration of a philosophical and fundamentally literary response to the problem of race, as offered in her interview with Katherine McKittrick in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis.
It is, in other words, a book that is attentive to the work of reading, a practice that extends across political, philosophical, literary and legal texts, so as to read how these texts themselves offer readings of the world. It is my wager that in placing black consciousness philosophy within this broader text, the unprecedented and unique contribution it makes to the work of exiting the script of race can become legible.1 Part of this intervention, of the unprecedented, is in how black consciousness philosophy performed a work of reading that drew together disparate texts – Robert Sobukwe, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon – so as to produce the new. If there is a strong method in this approach, it is to be found in what Souleymane Bachir Diagne has called, in his reading of Senghor and the philosophical treatment of art in African Art as Philosophy, a ‘theory by all means’. This project is not, however, about evacuating race, about emptying blackness or whiteness of all meaning in order to produce some kind of post-racial future. Rather, what is at stake is the careful delineation of how such categories come to be produced, conceptually, and paying attention to their function within a system, how such structures are masked as nature. As Sylvia Wynter might phrase it, this is about reading race through the lens of mythoi and bios, so as to disclose how Man comes to be constructed, and the violences of that construction, which continue to be lived. Understanding the terrain, the script, on which we are lodged is the first step, for any of us, towards a concept of freedom that might be adequate to the post-apartheid.2
Coming after the script of race, seeking a method out of its lines, is not straightforward. Part of its difficulty has to do with the terms of its script: Man, body, and, through both of these, race, and its close companions: community, class and gender. I have not yet mentioned apartheid; at least, I have not mentioned it by name. The horizon is much broader than apartheid, or even colonialism, even if apartheid is the name after which Black Consciousness follows.3 The questioning that this text traces is lodged on a wider horizon, on and against the very terrain that makes such a horizon (of apartheid) possible: the script of Man. This book, then, seeks to stay with this questioning, a questioning that, in turn, must both abide by South Africa and depart from it. In it, I take my cue from Steve Biko, one of the founding members of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa in 1968, working through the concepts of community and race, man, indigeneity, and tactility, so as to arrive at the pedagogic intervention that is black consciousness philosophy.
The peculiarity of a question
The peculiarity of Black Consciousness can be read in the double move that constitutes the ‘making ready’ that conditions the expression of the philosophy of black consciousness as it emerges in South Africa. It is enunciated by a persona that names its statement through the inscription ‘I write what I like’ while signing the text of that inscription with the pseudonym ‘Frank Talk’.4 An obvious tension lies between these two inscriptions, which constitute a primary intervention in the art of making people ready. The former carries a sense of what we commonly refer to as ‘freedom of expression’, it is a freedom located in a writing that coincides with a certain self-proclaimed desire. The latter denotes a form of plainness and directness, a mode of articulation that resonates strongly with Michel Foucault’s discourse on parrhesia, and that is specifically joined to speech. Parrhesia is directed towards a mode of subjectivation that is resonant with an exercise with the care of the self.5
Between these inscriptions – declarations, wagers – unfolds the pedagogic formation of a people that is to be made ready. The inscription ‘I write what I like’ can be read as an affirmation directed against the textual production of the subject as non-white in South Africa, that is, as an existence over-determined by ‘the body’ in a racial script that deprives it of the capacities of reason, of writing, in short, of adequate enunciation in society. In contrast to this script it affirms literacy, it affirms self-control – it is what I like that is written, not that to which I am given over – it affirms participation in a society where reason is one of many available attributes, rather than the primary and definitive marker (the terms of this script, against which Biko’s intervention is framed, will be outlined in the second chapter). However, the second inscription, the signature that claims the capacity to speak the truth, even in the face of power, gives a sense of the contest into the midst of which this wager is thrown. The writer cannot write, enunciate, or speak, in its own name. Its freedom is in its speech, not in its lived experience. In this conjuncture, these two inscriptions articulate both a vision for what the social should be, as well as a mode of defiance: despite the closure of the social along racial lines, this subject will write, will produce its own desire, a desire that plainly and unwaveringly discloses the violence of the social that marks its enunciation while not allowing itself to be limited by that violence. Desire, in this instance, shifts from an attachment to what I want (as a loss), operating rather as an open production, setting afoot the new, that which exceeds what I want in the moment of its arrival.
This signature, however, also precisely designates that the writer is other than the assumed persona, and insists on a further necessity: encounter. This encounter is not necessarily a question of presence, rather it is a reminder of what the earlier affirmation remainders: that the production of some as non-white is marked in the body, in lived experience. The question of who speaks for whom in this formulation – does the persona speak instead of the non-white, or allow itself to be inhabited by any person, or does it speak to the apartheid state, or to those designated as white or non-white equally – is central to the problem of making ready. This tension, this difficult articulation, should be grasped as a formulation which is to be located in the ‘before’ of becoming that enables the emergence of a people-to-come, a formulation that echoes across the text of Black Consciousness, and that orients its address both towards and beyond South Africa, towards the ‘world’ as the condition of possibility of this people-to-come. In producing such a wager, the Black Consciousness Movement develops an unprecedented intervention that brings together the writings of figures like Biko, Fanon and Césaire, which tend to be read as discrete political texts in a broader field of negritude and radical black thought, in order to plot a philosophical trajectory out of the scripting of race.
The possibility of such an exit, of freedom, structures the philosophical intervention of black consciousness as I read it in this book, a possibility that holds much in common with the critical work of Sylvia Wynter. One of Wynter’s seminal texts in her project of de-universalizing Europe’s claim to the concept of Man is her response to the problem of 1492 in the Americas. Her essay, ‘1492: A New World View’, addresses the challenge of coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism in a moment when the question of memorializing this event was a matter of intense public debate, with the Smithsonian having embarked on its ‘seeds of change’ narrative. Wynter asks whether a ‘new and ecumenically human view that places the event of 1492 within a new frame … unique to our species’ (7) is possible. If there can be a third way that resists a slide into the ‘neoliberal piety of multiculturalism’ (and we should never forget that apartheid defined itself as a system of multiculturalism) and instead produces a ‘new us’ (41)?
At stake, here, as Gary Wilder in his Freedom Time reminds us, is the understanding of freedom in the post-1945 period, and into the postcolonial. It is in the interventions of Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor that Wilder locates an effort to think freedom outside of the sovereignty of the nation state. Indeed, Wilder goes so far as to argue that the nation, as such, is a trap that leads to a sense in which European countries as nations have laid claim to a world that the black body built (2). As my discussion of Césaire’s Return to the Native Land will show, for Césaire part of the work of decolonization is the recognition that the world, from which the colonized is always remaindered, is, in itself, produced through the touch of the colonized. Wilder argues that the nation is a product of decolonization, not its necessary cause (4). Despite the long history of the global process of nation making – including the Declaration of Abjuration of 1581, the Declaration of Independence of the United States, and the League of Nations, etc. – Wilder argues that the nation state emerges only at the moment of decolonization, out of what he calls the ‘national-imperial system’ (97).6 Decolonization, in other words, was a global phenomenon that was framed as local through an opportunistic attachment to the intensities of struggle and resistance. Drawing on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Wilder argues that this is not a process of re-imagining the nation, but rather of ‘unthinking’ the paradigms that make of Europe’s others a province. The privileged paradigms that Europe claims for itself do not hold. We do not need to provincialize Europe; rather, we need to de-provincialize Europe’s others (10). Such a move is not about developing the periphery into the image of the metropole, but rather, following Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, inventing ‘new concepts’, setting ‘afoot a new man’ (253–5), recognizing the question of decolonization as a question of the world.
It is in this sense, of inventing the new, that Wilder argues both that negritude is a question of time and that it should be understood as a ‘critical theory of modernity’, not an ‘affirmative theory of Africanity’ (8). A question of time as, inhabiting the space of the in-between, refusing the inherited paradigms of difference, negritude clears the ground for the arrival of a new concept of man, ‘made to the measure of the world’. As a critical theory of modernity because it has, at its core, a reading of the question of political modernity, namely, how to be free and equal as a people. What is at stake in thinking decolonization as a question of ‘freedom time’ is the possibility of a sustained freedom, not only from colonial empire, but also from the liberator (259).
Within this frame it becomes possible to grasp Sylvia Wynter’s insight that at the core of any attempt to come after empire, of any attempt seeking to respond adequately to the exclusions that such a formation entails, resides an injunction placed on the storyteller (not the historian).7 This injunction is double. She writes: ‘we cannot give up writing stories about what it means to be human that displace those that are at the foundation of empire’ (in Rodriguez, 2018, p. 831). These stories must have a function – to displace, and in so doing, to make possible a sense of the human that would exceed the strictures of empire, and that the reader, as a writer of stories, can never ‘give up’. The human, in Wynter’s intervention, becomes the site at which the ongoing interruption of decolonization should be targeted. Wynter’s statement draws on her extensive reading of the place of mythoi and bios in the formation of human subjectivity. The human, she argues through reading of Fanon and Césaire together for their common intervention, is constituted both as an organism in the world, as biological, and as a scripting of that world, as storied (16). Despite the trick of modernity which, as Collette Guillaumin and Fanon have taught us, passes this scripting off as nature, as only biological, the recognition of the fundamentally scripted foundation of the human, and the shifts this has entailed through the centuries, implies the possibility of an exodus from a particular script. Difference, in our modernity, emerges as a peculiar expression of this scripting, ‘one from which we cannot escape, at least, not without scars’, to paraphrase Césaire on the United States of America.
The urgency of Wynter’s intervention stems from what she reads as a missed opportunity in the moment of decolonization (her example is the productivity of Césaire and Fanon’s interventions, which have not yet opened a new script), where the postcolonial has become a mimicry of Europe (20). Not taking the chance for a re-scripting, for Wynter, signals a drifting towards a new catastrophe (18) that she reads, for us, as expressed in the climate crisis. As such, the ‘liberal monohumanist’ concept of man and its scripting of difference is what dominates the horizon of our times, and is what must be escaped through positing a sense of the ‘hybridly human’ so as to get out of the ‘knee-jerk limits of the Us and Them’ (24, 45, 49). It is precisely such a project of texturing difference that I read in the project of black consciousness understood philosophically.
Texturing difference
As Collette Guillaumin and, more recently, Achille Mbembe, have both argued, what is at stake is not the recognition of difference, but rather its production, its figuration within a system of marks that invents a racial script from which we are ceaselessly trying to walk.8 Coming to terms with apartheid, perhaps, will require grappling with the articulations and elaborations that structure its conceptual terrain: community; the script of Man; indigeneity and tactility – turned differently, towards a question of freedom.
The grammar of community
Community, rather than being understood as a naturally or even a socially defined construct, needs to be grappled with at the level of its conceptual articulation: attending to what it seeks to produce, or make cohere, in the social. The discursive space of what we, poorly or even too quickly, call post-apartheid South Africa is, however, ostensibly saturated with the claim to community: in the everyday, community is that entity in whose interests protest action is taken, suspected criminals are burned, political promises are produced. From a scholarly perspective, community in the wake of apartheid is what must be recovered, healed, or perhaps even produced again, but always a production in the name of ‘community’. In this claim, however, it is necessary to return the question of community to its limit – a limit that incorporates its role in the articulation of the conceptual terrain of apartheid and reaches into the potentiality, haunting the articulation of community that comes in apartheid’s wake. In the first chapter, I explore a long genealogy of community with regard to the politics of race in South Africa. In one iteration, legible in the writings (philosophical, political and legislative) of both the liberal critics of apartheid and its architects, community operates as a differential through which whiteness functions as a unified ontological category that enables a claim to the status of Man. It is produced through the concomitant production of blackness as the marker of body, physicality, and the not-quite Man. Against this understanding, and yet partaking in its ground, community also comes to operate as a constitutive element of the post-apartheid, a function that can be discerned in one of post-apartheid’s preeminent formations, namely the 1955 Freedom Charter. This is not to suggest an argument of failure. Rather, that community needs to be read to the letter. As such, I frame my reading of community through a consideration of the concept as it unfolds in Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s thought, and passing it through two key interventions from the 1980s in the form of Jeremy Cronin’s ‘Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang’ [‘A Person Is a Person Because of Other Persons’] 1999 [1984] and Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981), so as to conjure a sense of how community has been grasped as a constitutive limit for the thinking of what comes after apartheid, not a limit from which thought must withdraw. Such a reading, a commitment to staying along the motile edge of community, is, perhaps, the pedagogical act that could lead to the post-apartheid as a possibility.
The script of Man
There is, however, no straightforward movement whereby the new might be declared. Rather, as Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1963) reminds us, what an effective critique of the concept of Man and its expressions of community necessitates is, precisely, the weightiness of blackness: an encounter with Fanonian tactility and Césairean indigeneity. It is through a reading of the lines along which the concept of Man orders the plane, the script, from which the intervention of black consciousness philosophy attempts to escape, that the force of such an encounter gains its resonance. A consideration of the concept of the ‘world citizen’, as this hinges on Immanuel Kant’s understanding of aesthetics and judgement, enables a reading alongside Spivak (1999) and Michel Foucault (2008), among others, that traces the co-constitutive articulation of the ‘world citizen’, Man, and race. While it has become a commonplace in much writing on the emergence of modern philosophy – and with it, the whole construction of the humanities – to mark, with increasingly exacting detail, the points at which it is racist, my concern in the second chapter is rather to ask after the function of race in its articulation. Through reading Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) to the letter, I argue that Kant’s invocation of race works to settle an anxiety that saturates his text, an anxiety as to the terms through which he might claim himself as a ‘world citizen’, in other words, as ‘Man’. This anxiety is made most explicit in a footnote in which Kant inextricably links world citizenship to the colonial project (cf. 231).
