A meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative.

Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.

Paperback, published in 2023, 158 pages. Artwork on the cover: Umzi Watsha by Mzwandile Buthelezi.

Tendayi Sithole is Professor in Political Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at University of Johannesburg.

Table of Contents

Aperture

1. Aunt Hester’s Flesh

2. The Specter of the Africanistic Presence

3. “Sophisticated Lady”—On Phonographic Authorship

Verso