Prof Suren Pillay

Suren Pillay holds the  A C Jordan Chair in African Studies,  and  is Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research focusses on political violence, citizenship and justice claims; and the politics of knowledge production and intellectual history; all concerned with the political and intellectual legacies of colonialism in the present. He was the principal investigator of the Mellon-funded project, Other Universals: Thinking About Politics and Aesthetics from Postcolonial Locations. Pillay’s most recent book is Predicaments of Knowledge: Decolonization and Deracialization of Universities (Wits Press 2025). His previous book  was the edited volume, On the Subject of Citizenship, Late Colonialism in the World Today (Bloomsbury Press: New York 2023). With Chandra Sriram he is also co-editor of the book,  Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa (London: James Currey and Natal: UKZN Press 2011) winner of a CHOICE award from the American Publishers Association.  He holds an  MPhil, and a  PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York. He is a previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, and a current editor of the journals Transformation, and Postcolonial Studies.  He is a board member of the Program for African Social Research (PASR) and has held visiting fellowships and professorships at Sciences Po, Paris; Columbia University in New York, the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, Makerere University, Uganda, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He is also a visual ethnographer, having exhibited work mainly in the medium of photography.

Areas of Supervision

political violence, citizenship and migration,  settler colonialism, justice claims; decolonizing knowledge; African intellectual history; political theory 

Courses 

ASL 2202F African Political Thought

ASL 4211F/ ASL 5202F Problematizing the Study of Africa 

Current Research

I am currently working on two research projects towards book publications.

The first, titled Napoleon Meets the Sphinx traces  the ways in which race as a modern phenomenon has shaped understandings of Africa and African Studies  in colonial and anti-colonial thought. 

The second is a long term study,  near completion,  focused on how political violence was understood during the anti-apartheid struggle, and later in transitional justice mechanisms, and into the postapartheid present.  It is provisionally titled  In the Shadows of Sovereign Force: Surviving Political Murder in a Settler Colony