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Rozena Maart

University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Humanities, Faculty Member

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My work crosses between and among political philosophy, psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction and Black Consciousness. I also write fiction and love food, both cooking and eating.
Address: South Africa

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University of Oxford

Western Sydney University

University of Bristol

Central European University

University of Chichester

Fordham University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Deakin University

Franco Barchiesi

Ohio State University

Francisco Vazquez-Garcia

Universidad de Cadiz

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Papers by Rozena Maart

Introduction: Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge in the works of Lewis R. Gordon

Meditation on the Sea and its African Subjects

Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions and Heterogeneities in the Epistemes of Salt Water, 2023

InthischapterIengagewithvariousonlinenewspaperaccounts of the African body that lands on European... more InthischapterIengagewithvariousonlinenewspaperaccounts of the African body that lands on European beaches via the Mediterranean Sea. Dead by exhaustion from crossing the ocean or dead as a consequence of boarding a sea vessel, which has capsized because it was not equipped to carry the embodied subject identities of Africans leaving the continent in droves to seek refuge on the continent of the European colonizer, the African body as a matter of concern for Europeans has garnered perverse and troubling interest in various United States and European online news papers over the past ten years. The European colonizer usurped African land and people from the fifteenth century onwards, kidnapped African labour, whilst simultaneously exploiting and extracting raw materials to develop its wealth in a starving, ailing, and diseaseinfested Europe.

Maart. Black Bodies on South African Beaches. pdf

Alternation Special Edition 33, 2020

This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of... more This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of whom directed theirs at the Black beachgoers of South Africa in late December 2015 and the early days of January 2016. The article recognises the events of #KingGeorgeMustFall at the University of KwaZulu- Natal and later #RhodesMustFall, which began in March 2015 as one of the backdrops of this discussion on physical space as politicised space and assert here the crucial components of flora and fauna such as the sea, sand, and the beach within a larger discussion on decolonisation. Discussions on decolonisation in South Africa have to include a critique of beaches as sites of enjoyment, which considering its colonial and apartheid history has since South Africa’s transition towards a democracy2 brought about an annual outpour of racist outbursts on social media, more particularly in the past decade, that foregrounded its racism by attacking Black bodies. In unpacking the content of Sparrow’s first posting, mainly, and her subsequent published apologies during interviews with journalists, the article moves towards a discussion of the Hegelian master and slave dialectic with a focus on desire, enjoyment and pleasure. It follows on with Lacanian jouissance, which is merged through the use of a South African language of desire drawn from the Kaaps vernacular (see footnote 1), with a Fanonian, Derridean and Bikoesque lens in addressing Black bodies on South African beaches as subjects who are agents and carriers of pleasure, surplus pleasure and orgasmic pleasure.

Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and... more The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented. UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university. UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world. UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection. Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to. Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Leonard Harris

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

in Conversation with Leonard Harris ROZENA MAART: Can you tell readers a little bit about yoursel... more in Conversation with Leonard Harris ROZENA MAART: Can you tell readers a little bit about yourself? Where were you born? How did you become interested in philosophy? LEONARD HARRIS: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest son of first-generation migrants from a racially segregated south to the industrial north. At a Black college, Central State University, Francis Thomas and Marian Musgrave, my philosophy and English teachers encouraged me. I was a Black hippie, Black power advocate, poet, and generally lost. ROZENA MAART: What stood out during your university years that made you realise that you had a path to carve for yourself within philosophy? LEONARD HARRIS: Nothing. Francis Thomas told me that they needed a Negro at Miami University to go to graduate school in philosophy, and he picked me. Miami decided to admit a Negro to the historically all-White school, and I was the experiment.

Addressing the Afterlife of Slavery

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Jane Anna Gordon

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

Can you tell us a little about your schoolingboth formative and later yearsand what led to your i... more Can you tell us a little about your schoolingboth formative and later yearsand what led to your interest in political theory and your book's subject matter? JANE ANNA GORDON: I will speak first to what was really formative and second to how I came to political theory because, in many ways, by entering into political theory as a field, happened much later. When I think about my own scholarship, it is apparent that there were three really formative dimensions. The first was my situation: my parents are both South African, and they were both only children. So, whenever the school year would end, we would travel to South Africa to spend time with and later care for their elderly parents. I regularly travelled as a small child between Chicago, in the United States and Cape Town, South Africa, with some time spent in Kommetjie (a small town along the west coast of the Cape Peninsula). This was in the 1970s and 1980s. (I was born in 1976.) .... ROZENA MAART: Wow. .. I just got goosebumps, not in terms of your age but the year you were born and what the year 1976 means to me.

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Sabine Broeck

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

in Conversation with Sabine Broeck ROZENA MAART: In Chapter one of your book, Against Gender: Ens... more in Conversation with Sabine Broeck ROZENA MAART: In Chapter one of your book, Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism you introduce your point of departure for the book, on page 1, as follows: 'This book is about a (self-)critical recuperation of White feminist interventions, which have paradigmatically shaped my generation's trajectory of gender studies. It could not have been written without Black feminism'. Can you elaborate on this a little? SABINE BROECK: The two most important mental turning points I went through in my decades [of] long study of Black feminism were, one, that it has entirely reshaped my idea of White feminism's philosophical premises and second, that therefore I needed to study and destruct the epistemic regime of post-Enlightenment White power (including the paradigm of gender) instead of continuing the well-established, practice of White-on-Black ethnography (which is a standing practice in theory and/or lit crit, too!) that has been the overall gist of much White research and teaching of Black diasporic cultures and literatures, including my own for a long phase of my professional life. Apart from having been impacted upon by personal interaction with Black scholars and activists which have massively amplified and furthered those insights, I have been invited and pushed into these reconsiderations by a series of crucial Black feminist texts which have become signposts for this trajectory I am still learning within. In 1969, Fran Beale published 'Black Women's Manifesto: Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female'.

Black feminism in the 1980s

Agenda (Durban), Jan 2, 2014

Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2014

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled "When Black Consciousness Meet... more This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled "When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness," which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence-against-women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialismrelying on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis-when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's "White Mythology" to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwined analysis that my work on White consciousness emerged in the 1990s-and with which I continue-as is evidenced throughout the paper. In unpacking this dialogue, I situate the complexities that arise from the pedagogical practices within philosophy when race takes center stage within a discipline that has written itself as though race does not exist. For many Black women who earn doctoral degrees in philosophy, the choice of where to work-in which country let alone in which department to apply for a job-is a reality few of us care to remember. Those of us who are employed in philosophy departments at present either consider ourselves fortunate or contemplate developing interests in other disciplines, thinking that we'd have a better chance at a full-time job in a sister discipline, such as women's and gender studies, ethnic studies, or cultural studies. Currently I work at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in Philosophy and Gender Studies and also as the Director for the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity. I teach a broader range of courses than do most of my Black women colleagues in philosophy in the United States, and I am able to bring to my

Enslavement as a Constant Feature of Human History

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

In her third single-authored book, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, Jane Anna Gordon, ... more In her third single-authored book, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, Jane Anna Gordon, Manchester (UK) born and Chicago raised, of Jewish South African parents, offers readers a thought-provoking, rigorous and wellformulated series of arguments in four chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Jane Anna Gordon is a Professor of Political Science by training and has university affiliations in American Studies, El Instituto, Global Affairs, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, at Storrs. Jane was also the president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2014 to 2016. Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement is an articulate, diligently documented, beautifully written, and superbly argued book that proved difficult to put down. It offers readers the much sought after "faces of enslavement", and "degrees of statelessness" that we would all like to know of, as we look back at our past and contemplate the way forward amid the most recent worldwide protests that brought a global face to the state of racism and enslavement still in operation. A large portion of the protests that swept the transatlantic from the Americas to Europe geared their acts of rebellion at toppling statues of colonialists involved in the slave trade, the evidence of which we witnessed from South Africa to the United

Decolonisation and Food: The Burden of Colonial Gastronomy – Stories from West Bengal

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

This article makes an effort to unpack the ways in which the traditional food customs of precolon... more This article makes an effort to unpack the ways in which the traditional food customs of precolonial Bengal were colonised by the Europeans, especially the British, followed by the Portuguese. In the course of its unpacking, the article reflects rather elaborately, as the details reveal, on how the colonisation of food customs and culinary practices of precolonial Bengal opened gateways for the Europeans to fragment the traditional society of precolonial Bengal socially, culturally, racially and communally. With scant references to the colonisation of food in Cape Town, South Africa, where the Dutch brought Bengali families in the middle of the 1600s as enslaved peoples to assist them in setting up a halfway station for their continued colonisation of India, this article also explores the various possibilities of decolonising the colonial and capitalistic invasions of European and North American food customs and culinary practices in contemporary West Bengal, in particular.

Diversidad de situaciones nacionales: El principio de responsabilidades comunes pero diferenciadas

Special Issue Alternations Journal Decoloniality and Decolonial Education South Africa and the World

Alternations: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Arts and Humanities and Southern Africa, May 15, 2021

This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is ... more This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, coloniser – colonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.

Rainbow Schooling Pains: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of Model C Schooling in South Africa – In Dialogue with Rozena Maart

This article explores the schooling history of the author as a Black South African who grew up in... more This article explores the schooling history of the author as a Black South African who grew up in the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, during which time she had to endure a colonised Model C education. The article looks at the history of the author's schooling as a way to identify and recognise the trauma that the author, and others in a similar position, have suffered in the new democratic South Africa. The discussion of some of this angst and the Model C experience as one of its sources is discussed in this article against the backdrop of the colonial matrix of power. This is done to analyse some experiences that the author faced in a way that exposes the continued dominance of White supremacy in Model C schools after the end of apartheid.

Philosophy Born of Struggle

is Leonard Harris's long awaited collection of writings, that cover the length of his life's cont... more is Leonard Harris's long awaited collection of writings, that cover the length of his life's contribution. The title of the book is apt at describing the body of work that Leonard Harris began to shape since the early years following his doctoral degree at age 26 in 1974, from Cornell University. Influenced by Alain Locke philosopher, educator and one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissanceand Lydia Maria Child-abolitionist, novelist and women's rights activist-Harris was also influenced by David Walker and Angela Davis. After working for a few years Harris soon realised that the kind of philosophy that he was expected to teach was not the philosophy that embraced all of the human experiences in the world. Harris asked questions about human lifethe full range of human experiences, including, as he asserts, genocide, slavery, degradation, misery and cognitive dissonance. Harris did not stand idly by as the then philosophy curricula demanded that he teach courses based on the thoughts and ideas of European 'high-caste leisurely men' but broke into the White mythology of Philosophy and exposed its transparent, unnamed, White Supremacy which it shared with the Ku Klux Klan, stripped it of its core, and returned it to its owners. Harris did not want to embrace a set of ideas that stood in stark contrast to what he understood human experiences to be. It did not take long after Harris's doctoral degree and the first few years of his teaching, to

Black Bodies on South African Beaches: Lus en smaak jou lekkerding

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020

This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of... more This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of whom directed theirs at the Black beachgoers of South Africa in late December 2015 and the early days of January 2016. The article recognises the events of #KingGeorgeMustFall at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and later #RhodesMustFall, which began in March 2015 as one of the Black Bodies on South African Beaches 209 Kaaps vernacular (see footnote 1), with a Fanonian, Derridean and Bikoesque lens in addressing Black bodies on South African beaches as subjects who are agents and carriers of pleasure, surplus pleasure and orgasmic pleasure.

Introduction Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020

In this article I unpack the terms ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial’ as a means to address their r... more In this article I unpack the terms ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial’ as a means to address their respective histories in the South African context whilst also drawing on key examples within the global South. Many countries in the global South share histories of usurpation, coloniality and brutality at the hands of the same European colonisers. So, I offer, with overlaps, examples of the early stages of Portuguese, Dutch, British, Spanish, Italian and German colonialism, and their attempts at enslavement and colonisation. Whilst colonisation was for Europeans an escape from poverty, warfare, famine and disease, the pro- mise of immediate and continued wealth through usurpation, settler-coloniality and the acquisition of raw materials through forced slave labour in Africa and the Americas, it secured their prosperity into the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, the afterlife of which they remain beneficiaries to, and which historical texts fraudulently offer them praiseworthy mentio...

When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness in Feminist Organizations

Cahiers Charles V, 2006

Cet article est le fruit d’une recherche conduite entre 1991 et 1994 avec un groupe de femmes bla... more Cet article est le fruit d’une recherche conduite entre 1991 et 1994 avec un groupe de femmes blanches de la region d’Ottawa, en Ontario, au Canada, engagees dans la lutte contre la violence faite aux femmes et le racisme. L’extrait de cet atelier, presente ici, montre comment les differentes participantes decouvrent les nombreuses facettes d’une Conscience blanche jusque la ignoree. Ce sont les echanges verbaux de ce groupe de femmes qui sont au cœur de cet article et les reflexions a leur suite en decoulent directement.

Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy

Hypatia, 2014

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meet... more This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence‐against‐women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialism—relying on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis—when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology” to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwine...

Introduction: Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge in the works of Lewis R. Gordon

Meditation on the Sea and its African Subjects

Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions and Heterogeneities in the Epistemes of Salt Water, 2023

InthischapterIengagewithvariousonlinenewspaperaccounts of the African body that lands on European... more InthischapterIengagewithvariousonlinenewspaperaccounts of the African body that lands on European beaches via the Mediterranean Sea. Dead by exhaustion from crossing the ocean or dead as a consequence of boarding a sea vessel, which has capsized because it was not equipped to carry the embodied subject identities of Africans leaving the continent in droves to seek refuge on the continent of the European colonizer, the African body as a matter of concern for Europeans has garnered perverse and troubling interest in various United States and European online news papers over the past ten years. The European colonizer usurped African land and people from the fifteenth century onwards, kidnapped African labour, whilst simultaneously exploiting and extracting raw materials to develop its wealth in a starving, ailing, and diseaseinfested Europe.

Maart. Black Bodies on South African Beaches. pdf

Alternation Special Edition 33, 2020

This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of... more This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of whom directed theirs at the Black beachgoers of South Africa in late December 2015 and the early days of January 2016. The article recognises the events of #KingGeorgeMustFall at the University of KwaZulu- Natal and later #RhodesMustFall, which began in March 2015 as one of the backdrops of this discussion on physical space as politicised space and assert here the crucial components of flora and fauna such as the sea, sand, and the beach within a larger discussion on decolonisation. Discussions on decolonisation in South Africa have to include a critique of beaches as sites of enjoyment, which considering its colonial and apartheid history has since South Africa’s transition towards a democracy2 brought about an annual outpour of racist outbursts on social media, more particularly in the past decade, that foregrounded its racism by attacking Black bodies. In unpacking the content of Sparrow’s first posting, mainly, and her subsequent published apologies during interviews with journalists, the article moves towards a discussion of the Hegelian master and slave dialectic with a focus on desire, enjoyment and pleasure. It follows on with Lacanian jouissance, which is merged through the use of a South African language of desire drawn from the Kaaps vernacular (see footnote 1), with a Fanonian, Derridean and Bikoesque lens in addressing Black bodies on South African beaches as subjects who are agents and carriers of pleasure, surplus pleasure and orgasmic pleasure.

Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and... more The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented. UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university. UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world. UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection. Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to. Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Leonard Harris

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

in Conversation with Leonard Harris ROZENA MAART: Can you tell readers a little bit about yoursel... more in Conversation with Leonard Harris ROZENA MAART: Can you tell readers a little bit about yourself? Where were you born? How did you become interested in philosophy? LEONARD HARRIS: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest son of first-generation migrants from a racially segregated south to the industrial north. At a Black college, Central State University, Francis Thomas and Marian Musgrave, my philosophy and English teachers encouraged me. I was a Black hippie, Black power advocate, poet, and generally lost. ROZENA MAART: What stood out during your university years that made you realise that you had a path to carve for yourself within philosophy? LEONARD HARRIS: Nothing. Francis Thomas told me that they needed a Negro at Miami University to go to graduate school in philosophy, and he picked me. Miami decided to admit a Negro to the historically all-White school, and I was the experiment.

Addressing the Afterlife of Slavery

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Jane Anna Gordon

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

Can you tell us a little about your schoolingboth formative and later yearsand what led to your i... more Can you tell us a little about your schoolingboth formative and later yearsand what led to your interest in political theory and your book's subject matter? JANE ANNA GORDON: I will speak first to what was really formative and second to how I came to political theory because, in many ways, by entering into political theory as a field, happened much later. When I think about my own scholarship, it is apparent that there were three really formative dimensions. The first was my situation: my parents are both South African, and they were both only children. So, whenever the school year would end, we would travel to South Africa to spend time with and later care for their elderly parents. I regularly travelled as a small child between Chicago, in the United States and Cape Town, South Africa, with some time spent in Kommetjie (a small town along the west coast of the Cape Peninsula). This was in the 1970s and 1980s. (I was born in 1976.) .... ROZENA MAART: Wow. .. I just got goosebumps, not in terms of your age but the year you were born and what the year 1976 means to me.

Rozena Maart in Conversation with Sabine Broeck

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

in Conversation with Sabine Broeck ROZENA MAART: In Chapter one of your book, Against Gender: Ens... more in Conversation with Sabine Broeck ROZENA MAART: In Chapter one of your book, Against Gender: Enslavism and the Subjects of Feminism you introduce your point of departure for the book, on page 1, as follows: 'This book is about a (self-)critical recuperation of White feminist interventions, which have paradigmatically shaped my generation's trajectory of gender studies. It could not have been written without Black feminism'. Can you elaborate on this a little? SABINE BROECK: The two most important mental turning points I went through in my decades [of] long study of Black feminism were, one, that it has entirely reshaped my idea of White feminism's philosophical premises and second, that therefore I needed to study and destruct the epistemic regime of post-Enlightenment White power (including the paradigm of gender) instead of continuing the well-established, practice of White-on-Black ethnography (which is a standing practice in theory and/or lit crit, too!) that has been the overall gist of much White research and teaching of Black diasporic cultures and literatures, including my own for a long phase of my professional life. Apart from having been impacted upon by personal interaction with Black scholars and activists which have massively amplified and furthered those insights, I have been invited and pushed into these reconsiderations by a series of crucial Black feminist texts which have become signposts for this trajectory I am still learning within. In 1969, Fran Beale published 'Black Women's Manifesto: Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female'.

Black feminism in the 1980s

Agenda (Durban), Jan 2, 2014

Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2014

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled "When Black Consciousness Meet... more This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled "When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness," which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence-against-women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialismrelying on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis-when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's "White Mythology" to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwined analysis that my work on White consciousness emerged in the 1990s-and with which I continue-as is evidenced throughout the paper. In unpacking this dialogue, I situate the complexities that arise from the pedagogical practices within philosophy when race takes center stage within a discipline that has written itself as though race does not exist. For many Black women who earn doctoral degrees in philosophy, the choice of where to work-in which country let alone in which department to apply for a job-is a reality few of us care to remember. Those of us who are employed in philosophy departments at present either consider ourselves fortunate or contemplate developing interests in other disciplines, thinking that we'd have a better chance at a full-time job in a sister discipline, such as women's and gender studies, ethnic studies, or cultural studies. Currently I work at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in Philosophy and Gender Studies and also as the Director for the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity. I teach a broader range of courses than do most of my Black women colleagues in philosophy in the United States, and I am able to bring to my

Enslavement as a Constant Feature of Human History

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

In her third single-authored book, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, Jane Anna Gordon, ... more In her third single-authored book, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, Jane Anna Gordon, Manchester (UK) born and Chicago raised, of Jewish South African parents, offers readers a thought-provoking, rigorous and wellformulated series of arguments in four chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Jane Anna Gordon is a Professor of Political Science by training and has university affiliations in American Studies, El Instituto, Global Affairs, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, at Storrs. Jane was also the president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2014 to 2016. Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement is an articulate, diligently documented, beautifully written, and superbly argued book that proved difficult to put down. It offers readers the much sought after "faces of enslavement", and "degrees of statelessness" that we would all like to know of, as we look back at our past and contemplate the way forward amid the most recent worldwide protests that brought a global face to the state of racism and enslavement still in operation. A large portion of the protests that swept the transatlantic from the Americas to Europe geared their acts of rebellion at toppling statues of colonialists involved in the slave trade, the evidence of which we witnessed from South Africa to the United

Decolonisation and Food: The Burden of Colonial Gastronomy – Stories from West Bengal

Alternation, Dec 1, 2020

This article makes an effort to unpack the ways in which the traditional food customs of precolon... more This article makes an effort to unpack the ways in which the traditional food customs of precolonial Bengal were colonised by the Europeans, especially the British, followed by the Portuguese. In the course of its unpacking, the article reflects rather elaborately, as the details reveal, on how the colonisation of food customs and culinary practices of precolonial Bengal opened gateways for the Europeans to fragment the traditional society of precolonial Bengal socially, culturally, racially and communally. With scant references to the colonisation of food in Cape Town, South Africa, where the Dutch brought Bengali families in the middle of the 1600s as enslaved peoples to assist them in setting up a halfway station for their continued colonisation of India, this article also explores the various possibilities of decolonising the colonial and capitalistic invasions of European and North American food customs and culinary practices in contemporary West Bengal, in particular.

Diversidad de situaciones nacionales: El principio de responsabilidades comunes pero diferenciadas

Special Issue Alternations Journal Decoloniality and Decolonial Education South Africa and the World

Alternations: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Arts and Humanities and Southern Africa, May 15, 2021

This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is ... more This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, coloniser – colonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.

Rainbow Schooling Pains: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of Model C Schooling in South Africa – In Dialogue with Rozena Maart

This article explores the schooling history of the author as a Black South African who grew up in... more This article explores the schooling history of the author as a Black South African who grew up in the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, during which time she had to endure a colonised Model C education. The article looks at the history of the author's schooling as a way to identify and recognise the trauma that the author, and others in a similar position, have suffered in the new democratic South Africa. The discussion of some of this angst and the Model C experience as one of its sources is discussed in this article against the backdrop of the colonial matrix of power. This is done to analyse some experiences that the author faced in a way that exposes the continued dominance of White supremacy in Model C schools after the end of apartheid.

Philosophy Born of Struggle

is Leonard Harris's long awaited collection of writings, that cover the length of his life's cont... more is Leonard Harris's long awaited collection of writings, that cover the length of his life's contribution. The title of the book is apt at describing the body of work that Leonard Harris began to shape since the early years following his doctoral degree at age 26 in 1974, from Cornell University. Influenced by Alain Locke philosopher, educator and one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissanceand Lydia Maria Child-abolitionist, novelist and women's rights activist-Harris was also influenced by David Walker and Angela Davis. After working for a few years Harris soon realised that the kind of philosophy that he was expected to teach was not the philosophy that embraced all of the human experiences in the world. Harris asked questions about human lifethe full range of human experiences, including, as he asserts, genocide, slavery, degradation, misery and cognitive dissonance. Harris did not stand idly by as the then philosophy curricula demanded that he teach courses based on the thoughts and ideas of European 'high-caste leisurely men' but broke into the White mythology of Philosophy and exposed its transparent, unnamed, White Supremacy which it shared with the Ku Klux Klan, stripped it of its core, and returned it to its owners. Harris did not want to embrace a set of ideas that stood in stark contrast to what he understood human experiences to be. It did not take long after Harris's doctoral degree and the first few years of his teaching, to

Black Bodies on South African Beaches: Lus en smaak jou lekkerding

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020

This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of... more This article examines the outbursts of Penny Sparrow and Vanessa Hartley on social media, both of whom directed theirs at the Black beachgoers of South Africa in late December 2015 and the early days of January 2016. The article recognises the events of #KingGeorgeMustFall at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and later #RhodesMustFall, which began in March 2015 as one of the Black Bodies on South African Beaches 209 Kaaps vernacular (see footnote 1), with a Fanonian, Derridean and Bikoesque lens in addressing Black bodies on South African beaches as subjects who are agents and carriers of pleasure, surplus pleasure and orgasmic pleasure.

Introduction Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020

In this article I unpack the terms ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial’ as a means to address their r... more In this article I unpack the terms ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial’ as a means to address their respective histories in the South African context whilst also drawing on key examples within the global South. Many countries in the global South share histories of usurpation, coloniality and brutality at the hands of the same European colonisers. So, I offer, with overlaps, examples of the early stages of Portuguese, Dutch, British, Spanish, Italian and German colonialism, and their attempts at enslavement and colonisation. Whilst colonisation was for Europeans an escape from poverty, warfare, famine and disease, the pro- mise of immediate and continued wealth through usurpation, settler-coloniality and the acquisition of raw materials through forced slave labour in Africa and the Americas, it secured their prosperity into the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, the afterlife of which they remain beneficiaries to, and which historical texts fraudulently offer them praiseworthy mentio...

When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness in Feminist Organizations

Cahiers Charles V, 2006

Cet article est le fruit d’une recherche conduite entre 1991 et 1994 avec un groupe de femmes bla... more Cet article est le fruit d’une recherche conduite entre 1991 et 1994 avec un groupe de femmes blanches de la region d’Ottawa, en Ontario, au Canada, engagees dans la lutte contre la violence faite aux femmes et le racisme. L’extrait de cet atelier, presente ici, montre comment les differentes participantes decouvrent les nombreuses facettes d’une Conscience blanche jusque la ignoree. Ce sont les echanges verbaux de ce groupe de femmes qui sont au cœur de cet article et les reflexions a leur suite en decoulent directement.

Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy

Hypatia, 2014

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meet... more This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence‐against‐women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialism—relying on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis—when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology” to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwine...

Marikana: The Theatre of Cruelty . . .

A video snippet, interview style, that offers an account of the paper by the title, above. The ... more A video snippet, interview style, that offers an account of the paper by the title, above. The paper probes the possibility of the reasons of reason by interrogating the deconstruction of the subject—the Black man subject as policeman, and the Black man subject as miner—upon the grounds set out by the killing of miners at Marikana, called “The Marikana Massacre,” by the South African press who reported that not since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 had such force and brutality been witnessed than August 16th, 2012. Killed, murdered, brutalised, massacred, for no reason other than to assert the authority of the right to kill when wearing a South African police uniform, guided by the murder tactics handed over by White policemen, the Black policemen shot Black men , one after the other, resulting in a massacre – one, I call a theatre of cruelty, which inform my point of departure for a philosophy born of massacres. This paper tackles the salient features of what marks this relationship between the Black man who sees himself as a product of postmodernity and postapartheid, and the Black man as the miner.

Philosophy Born of Struggle: Philosophy Born of Massacres. Snippets of the day

Philosophy Born of Struggle: Philosophy Born of Massacres

Philosophy Born of Struggle, Philosophy Born of Massacres

A symposium with Prof. Leonard Harris and Prof. Rozena Maart offering accounts of some of the fou... more

An Open Letter to the German Association of American Studies Sunday 7th June 202020200607 115607 ldaekc

An Open Letter to the German Association of American Studies, 2020

An Open Letter to the Executive and Advisory Board of the German Association of American Studies ... more

An Open Letter to the organisers of the second International Girls Studies Association [IGSA] conference at Notre Dame

An Open Letter to the organisers of the second International Girls Studies Association [IGSA] con... more An Open Letter to the organisers of the second International Girls Studies Association [IGSA] conference at Notre Dame. This is Rozena Maart; I am writing to express my dismay at the manner in which, yet again, the young and very new, International Girls Studies Association [IGSA], have gone about advertising its second conference using images that are enormously offensive and which, in their depiction of Black women and Muslim girls and boys, seem to be consistent with past behaviour of overlooking inquiries into the manner in which in the organising of the conference-as such the key players who determine the direction of the conference and the agents of scholarship who entrench an already established White mythology-seem to continue with their colonial and imperial mastery and remain oblivious to the fact that their racism is unwanted, old and outdated and highly problematic even if disguised as feeble feminist fumbling of freedom of expression.

VIDEO and TEXT. WILLIAM R JONES AWARD IN PHILOSOPHY.doc

VIDEO INTERVIEW AFTER WINNING WILLIAM R JONES AWARD IN PHILOSOPHY. See paper on this academia si... more

RACE, SPACE AND THE CITY. Gendered, classed and racialised spaces. Presented at KZNIA August 13th 2016

A slide presentation on Gendered, classed and racialised spaces, which offers an account of how t... more

Special Issue (Alternations Journal): Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

by Rozena Maart, sayan dey, Ph.D., Juan Solis, Sabine Broeck, Cloris Porto Torquato, Patrick Bond, and Puleng Segalo

Alternations Journal, UKZN, May 15, 2021

This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is ... more This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by
eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, coloniser – colonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.