REFIGURING IN BLACK

158pp., paperback, Polity, Cambridge & Hoboken, 2023

ISBN: 9781509557028

Tendati Sithole engages with the thought of four key figures in the black radical tradition: Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus.

"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

"Sithole’s book offers deeply considered provocations about the nature of blackness … it is demanding because thinking and writing about blackness in a racist world (while being a black scholar) is demanding."
Journal of Literary Studies

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