THE PERVERSITY OF GRATITUDE, an apartheid education

200pp., paperback, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2024

ISBN: 9781439924976

Grant Farred on how his apartheid education - at Livingstone High School in Cape Town and then the University of the Western Cape - taught him how to think.

“Farred offers readers who dare a perverse anthropology of ‘the surprising intellectual processes that were put into motion precisely because of the violence that the apartheid regime intended its policies to enact on the disenfranchised mind.’ Both loving tribute to his intellectual influences and unsparing theorizing of the conditions of his education, Farred brings apartheid thinking, as a ‘primal scene,’ home to Heidegger and Derrida. Relentless in its audacity, dizzying in its intellectual reach and range, this book thinks - with rigor, ferocity, and grace - the unthinkable.” Dana Nelson, Nancy Perot Chair of English and Professor of American Studies at Vanderbilt University, and author of Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency undermines the power of the people

“Existential, confessional, deconstructive, self-reflexive, linguistically fraught, restlessly philosophic, The Perversity of Gratitude is autopoetic theorizing at its best, connecting worldliness with self, the word with the world, and meditative serenity with political turbulence. Grant Farred’s situated and grateful thinking transforms the ugly and given context of apartheid into a rich pretext for the only kind of learning that is worth the effort: learning against the grain.” R. Radhakrishnan, Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of History, the Human, and the World Between

Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is the author of Long Distance Love: A passion for football and The Burden of Over-representation: Race, sport, and philosophy, and editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical futures.