Texturing difference: indigeneity, tactility, and the text of "black consciousness philosophy"

Abstract

Texturing Difference: Indigeneity, Tactility, and the Text of "black consciousness philosophy" intervenes into contemporary debates around the postcolonial critique of apartheid through offering a new sense of an `undisclosed event' in the broader text of black consciousness philosophy. In approaching this broader text, I stitch together works that are considered to be more overtly political, such as the Freedom Charter and the interventions of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, with a number of more literary interventions by Mongane Wally Serote, Jeremy Cronin, Aimé Césaire, J.M. Coetzee, and Ousmane Sembène, and read this weave into the problem of what comes after apartheid. The literary as it emerges in this project offers a sense of reading that tracks well with Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the rhizomatic, and that is brought to bear on the more overtly political works that are generally taken as constituting its measure. It is precisely this act of reading that stages what is at stake in literature and its pedagogy as I inscribe it here: the literary emerges as essential to the attempt to not merely transcribe the lived experience of the black man but to think what it would be to inscribe such experience into the realm of community as such - what I have termed the community of the touch. Unfolding through four key moves that deal with the concepts of community, indigeneity, tactility, and life, as these are reworked and opened up in the touches that take place at the edge of the text of black consciousness philosophy, I argue that it calls for the practice of singularity as the living of a life--a life that does not expel, or vomit, the lived experience of the black man.