Refiguring in Black

Tendayi Sithole is Professor in Political Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at University of Johannesburg.

"Tendayi Sithole renders the black radical imagination as de/formation – as a proliferation of inscription and configuration automated, in this account, by convocation of four ceaselessly engrossing thinker-tinkers. Refiguring in Black explores their practices in the orchestration of ideas and life at black study's critical edge, and contributes to such by way of its own demonstration of how this insurgency is always an improvisation of form. This is a tradition of making and breaking form; a breaking into and away from it; an incessant refiguring. True to the spirit of its object, this book is wonderfully generous in its forging innumerable openings, or 'apertures' as Sithole puts it, that cannot but rewrite the world deranged."Fumi Okiji, University of California Berkeley"Tendayi Sithole broadens the range of acceptable conversations about Blackness by meditating on the ontological dimensions of Blackness through Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and Hortense Spillers. Sithole purposefully disrupts the Western canon on these aforementioned Black figures by reconceptualising Douglass, Morrison and Spillers via an explicit and unapologetic Black point of view. In the hands of Sithole, Douglass, Morrison and Spillers become insurgent intellectuals who act out an 'engaged insurgent praxis' against anti-Black racism."Theoria"Sithole’s book offers deeply considered provocations about the nature of blackness… this is the beauty of the book: it is demanding because thinking and writing about blackness in a racist world (while being a black scholar) is demanding."Journal of Literary Studies

• Aperture1. Aunt Hester's Flesh2. The Specter of the Africanistic Presence3. "Sophisticated Lady"—On Phonographic AuthorshipVerso