The Faculty of Law (UP Law) at the University of Pretoria (UP) recently announced the promotion of colleagues to higher academic rank. Among the successful candidates is UP law alumnus and scholar, Dr Joel Modiri, whose promotion to Associate Professor as from 1 January 2021 will also make him the youngest professor in the current employment of UP Law and UP at large. Modiri is also the Acting Head of the Department of Jurisprudence, where he began as a tutor and then rose through the ranks as assistant lecturer, doctoral student, lecturer, senior lecturer and now associate professor.

Some of Modiri’s major career highlights leading to this promotion include the Best Lecturer Award for First Year LLB students for the years 2016 to 2018; holding three fellowships (Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies; University of Oxford, UK; University of Columbia, NY);  JUTA Prize for Best Legal Education Paper: Southern African Law Teachers Association (2018); two citations in South African Constitutional Court judgements (Afriforum v UFS; Tshabala v S…) and invited speaker at the 17th and 18th sessions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA).  

UP Law celebrates this remarkable milestone with Dr Modiri. A very proud Dean Professor Elsabe Schoeman congratulated Modiri on his promotion.  ‘We are enormously proud of you, Joel!  Congratulations on adding one more feather to your successful academic cap!’

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UP Law posed a few questions to Modiri to gain some insight to his background and life:

UP Law:  Provide us with a brief overview of where you were born and bred. You matriculated at Sutherland High School in Centurion.  Were you actively involved in leadership and politics in school too?

JM:

I grew up in Atteridgeville and later moved to Eldoraigne, Centurion, where I completed my primary and secondary schooling. Atteridgeville is an understudied, but crucial site for the ferment of black resistance politics under apartheid, and a major home of key intellectuals of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). I would think this was unconsciously pivotal to my own critical and political sensibilities and ultimately my interest in black political thought and critical race theory. 

At school, I participated in a number of challenges to school authorities over tuck-shop prices and unfair disciplinary practices, which today I recognise as inchoate expressions of socialist, radical-democratic and abolitionist praxis.  In high school I was much more actively involved in student life as a member and then leader of the Representative Council of Learners (RCL), a member of the school’s Governing Body and house captain and senior prefect in charge of discipline and policy.  While I played some sport (rugby and long jump), I had already been convinced in high school that the pen is mightier than the sword – so I received my Honours awards in Leadership and in Public Speaking and through involvement with the school magazine and website.

UP Law:  When you joined UP Law in 2010 as an LLB student, was it your goal to join the legal academy and ultimately become a professor? – the current youngest professor at UP Law and UP at that!

JM: 

I came to study law with the typical corporate ambitions in the American-sitcom style of a hotshot lawyer. And this is why University education has such profound transformative power: it was through the writings of Professors Tshepo Madlingozi (now at Wits) and Karin van Marle (now at UFS) that I discovered critical legal theory, critical race theory, feminism and African jurisprudence – which opened up a completely new intellectual vista for me – about how to think expansively about what law is and means in a critical, contextual, imaginative, and interdisciplinary way.  This accidental encounter (what poet Dionne Brand captures in the line “we meet in careless intervals…”) with these two exceptional teachers and with critical theory was life-changing. Today, I cannot imagine another path I could have followed but this one. To attain the title of professor for me has less to do with the status and seniority and more to do with the increased demand to do the work of service to a new generation of students and intellectuals. And let’s not forget that there is still one more hurdle (of full professor) to go through!

UP Law:  What are your short to medium term goals?

JM:

The main goal is to continue to be an active interlocutor in the intellectual communities I inhabit, to shift the discourse of law and jurisprudence to take the black historical experience and black intellectuals seriously, and to participate in building a strong, cohesive Department of Jurisprudence.  More concretely, I hope to rework my doctoral thesis into a book in the coming year – something which requires time and space away to think and write.  Then I have a number of unfinished projects specifically focusing on developing the theory of constitutional abolitionism and Azanian critical theory by way of a historical and philosophical critique of post-1994 constitutionalism.

UP Law:  What are your long-term goals, i.e. where do you see yourself at the end of the decade?

JM:

Ten years feels almost too distant to navigate in my mind – but I really do hope that by 2030, UP Law and the legal academy generally will be a much more radically transformed and intellectually challenging environment where new and unorthodox critical ideas will have claimed greater space in the curriculum and scholarship.  This will take work, as well as institutional support and funding, to accomplish.  Further, I plan to stay in the academy until retirement in 2056 (!) so the long-term goal is really to keep the momentum and the energy and to not despair as this world appears to become more and more unlivable for those on its underside.

UP Law:  The fact that you were on a road to success and working towards success was quite clear at the onset of your LLB studies.  Inter alia, you had your first accredited academic publication in 2011 as a second-year law student and to date you have published close to 20 publications.  You obtained the degree LLB cum laude in 2013. How did you ensure and managed your success? 

JM:

By working hard and playing harder ☺. But on a more serious note: I started writing and reading on these topics almost a decade ago out of a real and searching curiosity and wonder about the possibilities of critical theory for renewing our understanding of the world and ourselves.  It never felt like a form of work that needs to managed and planned.  It felt very much like what it means to engage in philosophy as a way of life.

UP Law:  Your PhD thesis titled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid”.  Tell us more.

JM:

The doctoral study really helped me to really clarify what animates my scholarly project.  The central concern of my research is to interpret and narrate the archive of Pan-Africanist and black radical thought in South Africa and beyond in jurisprudential terms – that is, as a source of legal ideas about justice, freedom, equality, political power, social organisation, subjectivity. The anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analyses and critiques of state power, global white supremacy, intersubjective and structural racism, of the cultural and spiritual dehumanization of colonized peoples that thinkers in the Pan-Africanist black radical tradition (such as Steve Biko) elaborated and worked out in the course of political struggles reflect, for me, the concerns of a critical jurisprudence – maybe not an alternative jurisprudence but a jurisprudence that is otherwise. My interest is to contemplate jurisprudence from the starting point of the black historical experience in the longue-duree.

In my doctoral and postdoctoral work specifically, I am attempting to develop an indigenous or homegrown critical theory of race and liberation with reference to the tradition of Black Consciousness.  I am extending this also to the Africanist archive more broadly to include Anton Lembede and Robert Sobukwe among others. There is much to say about this Africanist tradition – also known as the Azanian tradition – but the main thing to highlight is that this is a tradition to the black radical left of the ANC, pursued a nationalist and internationalist anti-colonial position against the currently ruling ANC’s historically liberal multiracial, integrationist and accommodationist position.

UP Law:  What are your hobbies/extra-mural activities?  How do you ensure that you have a balanced life-style?

JM: 

There is an inherently social and human dimension to academic life. I have never been one to say no to a lunch or dinner with good friends, good food and good wine – and I am really concerned about the culture of overwork and competitiveness that has become the norm in academia to the detriment of the social aspect. To work off the wine, I hike quite avidly.  Not being one for the disciplinary machinery of the gym, hiking, communing with the natural world, is a great way to clear the mind and stay fit.

Then there is the life-giving force of music – every activity and story of my life is punctuated by music – my muses, Aretha Franklin and Busi Mhlongo, jazz in all registers, 80s-90s RnB that was a Sunday staple. Cesaria Evora, Joni Mitchell and Omar Sosa are new favourites. 

Related to this is travel – finding quaint and interesting places to visit near and far – and art.  I probably spend most of my time reading (theoretical texts, novels and works of poetry) both for a living and for life.

UP Law:  Do you have a message for the young (prospective) law student out there from any race or creed?

JM: 

Trust in your own voice. Do no harm. Do not despair.

News coverage:

Pretoria News

Young academic makes history at Tuks

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