Texturing Difference: "Black Consciousness Philosophy" and the "Script of Man" (Critical South)

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.

Maurits van Bever Donker is Research Manager and Professor in the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.