Tendayi Sithole Libri

Exploring the concepts of subject, abject, and insurgent, this work by Hortense J. Spillers delves into their individual meanings and interconnections. It aims to confront and challenge the racist heteropatriarchal structures that perpetuate antiblackness. Through critical analysis, the book provides a framework for understanding and resisting these oppressive forces.

Focusing on the correspondence of influential figures like Sylvia Wynter, Assata Shakur, and Frantz Fanon, this work explores how their letters serve as critical reflections on dehumanization through the lens of black radical thought. Tendayi Sithole delves into the themes and ideas expressed in these letters, highlighting their significance in advocating for social justice and challenging oppressive narratives.

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.

Drawing upon Africana existential phenomenology, black radical thought, and decoloniality, Sithole offers a new way of thinking about the contemporary relevance of seminal thinkers such as Wynter, Cesaire, Shakur, and Biko--

Refiguring in Black is a meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative. Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.

This is the first book-length work to focus on the philosophical and anthropological contribution of Mabogo More, a prominent and influential black South African existentialist thinker.