Refiguring in Black - by Tendayi Sithole (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Tendayi Sithole renders the black radical imagination as de/formation - as a proliferation of inscription and configuration automated, in this account, by convocation of four ceaselessly engrossing thinker-tinkers. Refiguring in Black explores their practices in the orchestration of ideas and life at black study's critical edge, and contributes to such by way of its own demonstration of how this insurgency is always an improvisation of form. This is a tradition of making and breaking form; a breaking into and away from it; an incessant refiguring. True to the spirit of its object, this book is wonderfully generous in its forging innumerable openings, or 'apertures' as Sithole puts it, that cannot but rewrite the world deranged."
Fumi Okiji, University of California Berkeley

"Tendayi Sithole broadens the range of acceptable conversations about Blackness by meditating on the ontological dimensions of Blackness through Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and Hortense Spillers. Sithole purposefully disrupts the Western canon on these aforementioned Black figures by reconceptualising Douglass, Morrison and Spillers via an explicit and unapologetic Black point of view. In the hands of Sithole, Douglass, Morrison and Spillers become insurgent intellectuals who act out an 'engaged insurgent praxis' against anti-Black racism."
Theoria

"Sithole's book offers deeply considered provocations about the nature of blackness... this is the beauty of the book: it is demanding because thinking and writing about blackness in a racist world (while being a black scholar) is demanding."
Journal of Literary Studies

About the Author

Tendayi Sithole is Professor in Political Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at University of Johannesburg.