Seminar: Thinking race historically: perspectives from law and beyond

  • DATE

    23 February 2017

  • TIME

    14:00 - 15:00

  • VENUE

    Humanities Building, Room 18-26, Hatfield Campus

The Department of Historical and Heritage Studies invites you to a Departmental Seminar titled 'Thinking race historically: perspectives from law and beyond'. The seminar will be presented by Joel Modiri. Joel teaches jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria. He has published widely in the areas of critical race theory, poverty and critical pedagogy. He is currently completing his doctoral study on the philosophy of Black Consciousness and its relevance to post-1994 South African legal theory.

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to contemplate a conceptual undoing of the discursive decisions and gestures by which conquest, race and white supremacy were displaced or minimized as foundational terms in the South African historical and political imaginary. The theoretical insights of critical race theory, settler-colonial studies and Black Consciousness will be drawn upon to diagnose the widespread omission and repression of white domination and its material and symbolic implications from the academic curricula in the disciplines of law, humanities and social sciences. The diagnosis will track epistemologies of ignorance, 'conceptual whiteness', epistemic hostility to black radicalism and 'colonial unknowing' as the root causes of this general evasion of race.  The failure to grapple with settler-colonialism as a constitutive historical formation disables academics, readers and students from apprehending the present 'post-apartheid dispensation' as itself the afterlife of colonial-apartheid rather than its overcoming. The currently circulating contestations around land, university curricula, the personification of corruption in the figure of Jacob Zuma, the critique of white monopoly capital, and the criminalization of racism, among others, can all be read or traced to the problematic of colonialism and coloniality. Without reconstructing an entirely new historiographical paradigm, the presentation considers how these episodes of law, history, society and politics could be analysed if conquest and white supremacy were to be employed as central categories of analysis.

  • Contact: 012 420 2323
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