Black X: Liberatory thought in Azania – Tendayi Sithole
Tendayi Sithole unpacks his book 'Black X: Liberatory thought in Azania' (Camera: Nicholas Boyd; Editing: Darlene Creamer)
Sithole problematises the signifier X, as a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject. He argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past, and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He offers a new imagination for a liberatory project through the idea of Azania as a site of true emancipation.
In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole elaborates on the problematic signifier X, a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject, and presents the struggle for Azania as a liberatory project.
Sithole argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He shows how the colonial contract still stands, with the land question unresolved by the new constitutional dispensation. His thesis is that being and land are indissoluble, and the denial of the centrality of land restitution is a denial of the black being.
Drawing on the Black Consciousness philosophy of Steve Biko, he critiques the manner in which Marx and Marxism evade the reality of antiblack racism and landlessness as drivers of colonial conquest and ongoing forms of oppression, and emphasises existential struggle of the black subject through Mabogo P More’s African philosophy. Sithole foregrounds these iterations under the mark X, and shows how the black subject, as a dehumanized figure, must continue to radically insist on alternative forms of being in an antiblack world, and on Azania as the true form of liberation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tendayi Sithole is Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, University of Johannesburg. His recent books include The Letter in Black Radical Thought (2023).
'Black X: Liberatory thought in Azania' is published by Wits University Press
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