Description
Book SynopsisMoving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko''s meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from empirical absolutism that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousn
Trade ReviewSithole's critical decolonial foray into the liberatory ideas of Steve Biko is pioneering and refreshing in many ways. Biko is neither reduced to a simple shrine to be worshiped nor a hagiography to be celebrated. Through Sithole's sharp analysis, Biko is rightfully given a place in the burgeoning pantheon of black liberatory philosophies. -- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of "The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life"
This book is a profound ground-breaking account of Biko’s philosophy from a decolonial epistemic perspective hitherto unheard of. It is testimony to the relevance and ever growing re-emergence of Biko and the Black Consciousness philosophy in a country still suffering from antiblack racism, Nelson Mandela’s efforts at racial reconciliation notwithstanding. Sithole’s book is therefore a must-read for anyone trying to understand the confluence of existentialism and decolonial theory in Biko’s philosophy of Black subjectivity in an antiblack society. -- Mabogo Percy More, Professor of Philosophy, University of Limpopo
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Biko’s Contested Subjectivities Chapter 1: Biko: A Decolonial Philosopher Chapter 2: The Existential Scandal of Antiblack Racism Chapter 3: The Mask of Bad Faith Chapter 4: The Colonial State: The Freedom Charter and the Modicum of Freedom Chapter 5: The Racist State, the Law, and its Outlawed Chapter 6: Biko and the Problématique of Death Coda: Charting the Terrains of the De-colonial Turn
