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Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from "empirical absolutism" that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.
List of contents
Introduction: Biko's Contested Subjectivities
Chapter 1: Biko: A Decolonial Philosopher
Chapter 2: The Existential Scandal of Antiblack Racism
Chapter 3: The Mask of Bad Faith
Chapter 4: The Colonial State: The Freedom Charter and the Modicum of Freedom
Chapter 5: The Racist State, the Law, and its Outlawed
Chapter 6: Biko and the Problématique of Death
Coda: Charting the Terrains of the De-colonial Turn
About the author
By Tendayi Sithole
Summary
Moving away from the domain of idolization and veneration, Sithole situates Steve Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. Through an exploration of Biko's meditations, Sithole introduces Biko to readers as a decolonial philosopher, someone more than just a biographical subject.
