HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Professor Louise du Toit (University of Stellenbosch)  

Introduction: ‘The Black Man is in effect the ghost of modernity’, writes Mbembe. My tentative and explorative, questioning input in this seminar is to ask if, and where and how Black Woman enters the discourse on Black Reason and its critiques. My talk will not build a traditional argument. Instead, I present this article in the form of a glossary, to textually, but also visually and aesthetically, open up gaps in the tightly woven conceptual and discursive fabric of Philosophy (ancient and famously self-referential). A glossary normally secondarily accompanies and annotates a main text, but here there is no main text. The glossary is the thing. Working in the form of a glossary allows for refraction, mixing and cross referencing between different lexicons and registers of knowing. It also enables one to approach an established discourse as, in Katherine McKittrick’s words (McKittrick 2006), “demonic grounds,” i.e., a conceptual landscape underpinned by and re-generative of scripts of Black death and matricide, while at the same time engendering possibilities to know differently.  I am inspired by Tuck and Ree with their “Glossary of Haunting” (2013) which looks at haunting in the form of a glossary as a way of contesting the terms of settler colonial knowledge. I thus incorporate the notion of haunting (ghosts and spectres) in terms of both the form and content of this contribution. The talk is based on a piece I co-wrote with my colleague and former student, Azille Coetzee.

About the speaker:  Louise du Toit is Professor of Philosophy and Chair at the department at Stellenbosch University. She published A Philosophical Investigation of Rape (Routledge) in 2009. She has been a visiting professor or fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in 2017, 2020 and 2021, at the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry in 2018 and at Bristol University Law School in 2019. She has been a member of the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict international research group based at the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg since 2008.  She has published widely on feminist and social justice issues, and more recently also on topics within African (feminist) philosophy.

Convenor: Dr. Sanya Osha

More about HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

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