"Interrupting, the Human: Shuffling"
537 Heller Hall
Abstract: What does it mean to be adequate to a conjuncture? What, if anything, can such a project, and the failure thereof, teach us with regard to the work of freedom, and its time? In this paper, I suggest that “inaugurating postcolonial difference lodges difference not as a marker of identity … It is, instead, an ethics of response … [It] is, ultimately a possibility of reading.” It is Sylvia Wynter, throughout her oeuvre but most explicitly in her conversations with Katherine McKittrick, who posits a sense of the human that grasps it as a blending of “mythoi” and “bios”, of story and genetics. In this crucial framing for my intervention, being adequate means to always interrupt the narrative of the human: where one starts matters. The human functions as a ground for the articulation of, and claims to, particular rights. It is the human that claims freedom, and it is in the name of the human that the limits of these claims are also set out. As such, the paper offers “reading”, specifically a form of slow reading named as “shuffling”, which is gleaned from different scenes – among them the preambles and post-ambles of founding texts in South Africa’s transition from apartheid, and Biko’s court case – each of which add a new aspect to the “shuffle” by which a reading happens, as a method for exodus.
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About the Speaker
Maurits van Bever Donker is Associate Professor in the humanities and interpretive social sciences at the Centre for Humanities Research, where he is also the Research Manager and Convenor of the Centre’s research programme. His research specialisations are in Black Consciousness Philosophy, Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. van Bever Donker teaches a graduate seminar on "Political Biography and the National Liberation Struggle" in the department of Historical Studies, and is the Principal Investigator for a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) project on "A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom", which supports 10 postdoctoral researchers for two years. In the CHR, he convenes the Centre’s fellowship programme, which aims to develop the next generation of university educators in Africa. This includes the development and teaching of an annual directed reading programme, the development and teaching of joint graduate seminars, and providing mentorship to postgraduate students, as well as doctoral and masters supervision. Since 2022, Maurits has been an editorial board member and a chief editor, for the international peer-reviewed African studies journal Afrika Focus. His current book projects are titled Texturing Difference: Black Consciousness Philosophy and the Script of Man (under contract with Polity Press) and Technically Human. Prior to taking up the position as research manager and convenor, he was a Next Generation Scholar at the CHR.