Texturing Difference

"This book addresses the afterlife of the category of race on black consciousness in South Africa. Following Biko’s movement from 1968, van Bever Donker understands black consciousness as a philosophy, and he understands philosophy as an orientation in reading practice and one of world-making through writing. He identifies forms of black consciousness in the tenacious but nonetheless attenuated reading of blackness offered by theorists of black consciousness from around the world, like Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Robert Sobukwe. In turn, he employs that inclination developed in black consciousness to read these figures showing, in the course of this reading practice made praxis, how categories of race come into existence, are sustained and then naturalized, forming a script. The script is much larger than “the meaning of blackness.” It permeates everything—because it is in the script of man, indigeneity, community, tactility, all classic terms for conceptualizing man as affective actor in collaboration with others. For van Bever Donker, it is only in that praxis of black consciousness as a reading and writing practice that a concept of freedom might emerge that finds what is remaindered of race in our classical language of freedom. The claim of desire through the singularity of stance is evoked in the right to write and speak tangentially to the confining and tainted script, and thus to give a glimpse into a different form of freedom and world-making, one textured through an oblique form of touch, desire, and affect, through that which we may understand as the literary."
Ranjana Khanna, Duke University