RACE OTHERWISE, forging a new humanism for South Africa

195pp., illus., maps, paperback, Johannesburg, 2017

"Race Otherwise brings together the full amplitude of Zimitri Erasmus’s thinking about how race works. It tunes into registers both personal and social. It is not without indignation, and not...insensitive to emotion and...the anger inside South Africa. It is a book that is not afraid of questions of affect. Eros and love, Erasmus urges, are not separable from the hard work of thinking. "Crain Soudien, CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa

"Zimitri Erasmus questions the notion that one can know race with one's eyes, with racial categories and with genetic ancestry tests. She moves between the intimate probing of racial identities as we experience them individually, and analysis of the global historical forces that have created these identities and woven them into our thinking about what it means to be ‘human’...[She] argues for a new way of ‘coming to know otherwise’, of seeing the boundaries between racial identities as thresholds to be crossed, through politically charged acts of imagination and love." from the back cover

Zimitri Erasmus is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the editor of Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (2001).