Foreword
'Politics of Souls, Politics of Bodies'
Nadia Yala Kisukidi

What would a society free from oppression look like? And, crucially, how can we conceive of such a society in a way that not only brings it into being but also ensures that in doing so, we don't trigger a new cycle of the very violence we aim to eliminate? In spite of the urgency of these questions, theory tends to give only a muted response.

We've grown suspicious of discourses that frame social transformation as a matter of respecting human dignity. In Europe, utopias built on such a promise failed throughout the twentieth century. As a result, our efforts are now directed at producing critical analyses of how oppression and violence affect subjectivity rather than envisioning what a different future might look like. The science of misery promises no way out of misery, and even criticizes any attempt to think beyond it as naive. However, we must believe that conditions can change and alternatives exist - not just to keep hope alive against all odds, but because our existence, the very possibility of life itself, is at stake.

These challenges intensify when we confront the issue of combating racism. How can we envision a world rid of racism - a world rid of the politics of oppression that determines the fate of marginalized bodies, of bodies marked by alterity. What can our political imagination achieve when it's shackled by the very categories from which it is trying to break free?

When we take on the question of race, we encounter a distinctive set of challenges that stem from the nature of the struggle against racism itself. Indeed, racism's use of the concept of 'race' as a deadly weapon has also created an unprecedented opportunity: it allowed the very people it oppressed to reclaim 'race' as a refuge in their struggle. 'Race' has become, paradoxically, a sanctuary for those targeted by racism and, even more, a symbol of their rise. At the very heart of anti-racist struggles it is possible to witness the transformation of hostility into hospitality. The hostis, by becoming a host, becomes hospitable. Hospitality, hostility, and 'hostipitality', these three terms, brought together (and the third coined) by Jacques Derrida,1 provide an overview of the history of the political uses and abuses of racial signifiers.

'Nègre I am, Nègre I'll always be.'2 Césaire's bold statement stands as a radical expression of anti-racism, one that doesn't call for the suppression of the terms of hostility - 'nègre' or 'black'. The word 'nègre' - used to designate a race - confronts racism head-on. But perhaps there's a finer point here: when the signifier 'black' or 'nègre' is reclaimed and pronounced in the first person, it works to negate 'race' itself. The signifier 'black' is no longer a sign of subjugation, which is only effective when mediated by the white gaze, but a force unto itself that can reshape the future, a future untainted by the hatred that reifies and demeans bodies. 'Black', used as rallying cry rather than a racial designator, offers a new political semiotics by transforming the grammar and semantic structure of the world.

As we navigate the political imaginations that combat racism, we must learn, then, to accept the discomfort of aporias and paradoxes. Anti-racism doesn't simply abandon a racial - or seemingly racial - lexicon. And, when we believe we're hearing the idioms of 'race', as well as the various forms of hatred and insult long associated with them, we might actually be witnessing the construction of a new grammar, one that projects a shared paradise beyond racial lines. We must be attentive to this when probing the utopian visions of radical black traditions. They're not just casually flipping negative stereotypes on their heads in an effort to question the social practice of reappropriating insults in a context structured through liberalism. Instead, they're building a politics of justice, one that works as 'an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle'.3

The semiotics of blackness isn't structured around a perpetually fetishized white gaze, which reduces non-white identities to a state of non-being. Black can't be seen as the simple negation of white, as merely a differential sign. The semiotics of blackness also point to a utopian space, freed from racial violence: the term 'black' carries us towards another world - one that, by rejecting what is, makes us aware of the possibility of what has yet to emerge. Thus, racial signifiers, when reclaimed by those they were meant to suppress, often lose their racial charge and, in an act of self-abolishment, pave the way for new forms of utopian writing. This is what négritude means for Césaire (and perhaps for Senghor as well): the 'great black cry' [le grand cri nègre] may signal the end of racism and the concept of race. 'Black' doesn't belong to the master's vocabulary; it therefore shouldn't be discarded in the name of a colour-blind ideal of humanity. Rather, it's a 'miraculous weapon' that has the power to create what centuries of violence could not suppress: a world with a human face.

This cry isn't just about turning a fresh page in humanism's history, aiming to be more 'inclusive' and attentive to the Other, their body, their skin. It's about closing a chapter on a particular kind of humanism - the one born in modern Europe, which claimed humanity as the supreme value, while simultaneously denying it to those beyond its own borders whom it sought to conquer. The real scandal lies in the fact that this universal unity was achieved through the dispossession of others and the imposition of an unassailable asymmetry. Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of this in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Decolonization exposes the 'striptease of [European] humanism'.4 As Sartre made clear, 'the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters'.5 Moving beyond colonialism and its inherent racism, then, is not a discursive matter that consists of refurbishing old concepts. There's no flawed concept of universality to fix, no cracks in humanism to patch up to make it, as Senghor might say, 'whole'. We must set sail, leaving behind a continent, with its own arsenal, its own philosophies, and, rejoining the 'slaves and monsters', think from other shores.

Maurits van Bever Donker's Texturing Difference expresses this continental displacement in philosophical form. It does indeed set sail in search of a space that has yet to emerge, seeking a world that needs no barbaric other, no savage alterity, against which others define their humanity.

In South Africa, the landscape was fractured by colonial racism and white supremacy. Emerging in the folds of violence, utopian dreams took shape, forcing the past, present and future to intersect and contend with one another. How do we end apartheid? How can we invent a future community? How do we counter colonial narratives - white narratives - about Africa's past? How do we construct a radically different community that doesn't unwittingly reinforce the very racial and identity divisions that laid the conceptual groundwork for the policy of 'separate development' instituted in 1948?

Utopia is often just an exalted name for survival - or rather its inscription, its own form of writing. Texturing Difference seeks to decipher this writing, like it would a code, a secret correspondence that eludes interception and interpretation by any authority. It aims to uncover both a text, issued like a call to arms, and a texture, the very fabric that imbues it with historical - and corporeal - weight, and inscribes it in a situation. This last term should be understood in a Sartrean sense, evoking the 'set of inherited conditions'6 from which freedom, though bound and trapped by these very conditions, emerges as though in defiance of them. The coming society requires a total negation of everything that made apartheid possible - its structural conditions, its ghosts, its ideologies, the psychology that gave rise to it and which it, in turn, nourished, as well as the ever-present danger that it might resurface. By dismantling the delusional and destructive constructs of white racism, we give the world 'a more human face'.7

The black consciousness movement provided the signs of such a utopian writing under the apartheid regime. This writing is particularly pronounced in Steve Biko's I Write What I Like, a collection of texts published, sometimes clandestinely, between 1969 and 1977. Steve Biko was killed by the South African police on 12 September 1977. His writings are a testament to the diverse methods of black resistance to apartheid. In Texturing Difference, Maurits van Bever Donker offers a guide for reading them, for deciphering their signs. What emerges is a...