TEXTURING DIFFERENCE, 'Black Consciousness philosophy' and the 'Script of Man'
201pp., paperback, Polity, Cambridge & Hoboken, 2025
ISBN: 978150956305
"Maurits van Bever Donker argues that the Black Consciousness Movement found intellectual and conceptual allies in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, tracing the problem of race as foundational to what is called ‘the script of Man’ and, in the process, inventing the possibility of a new sense of Man, one with ‘a more human face’."
"This book addresses the afterlife of the category of race on black consciousness in South Africa ... He identifies forms of black consciousness in the tenacious but nonetheless attenuated reading of blackness offered by theorists of black consciousness from around the world, like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Robert Sobukwe ... For van Bever Donker, it is only in that praxis of black consciousness as a reading and writing practice that a concept of freedom might emerge that finds what is remaindered of race in our classical language of freedom." Ranjana Khanna, Duke University
Maurits van Bever Donker is Research Manager and Professor in the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.