Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Critical Africana Studies) - Softcover

Sithole Author Of Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations Of Black Consciousness, Tendayi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1498518206 ISBN 13: 9781498518208

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2017

Synopsis

Moving 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 Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.

About this title

About the Author

Tendayi Sithole is senior lecturer at the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa.

Review

Sithole'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" (2016) and "Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization" (2018))

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1498518206
• ISBN 13: 9781498518208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224