Azania, abolition and the death of white jurisprudence

In this talk, Professor Joel Modiri will present some aspects of his ongoing research. The central concern is to interpret and narrate the archive of Pan-Africanist and black radical thought in “South Africa” and beyond in jurisprudential terms – that is, as a source of legal ideas about justice, freedom, equality, political power, social organisation, subjectivity. The anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analyses and critiques of state power, global white supremacy, intersubjective and structural racism, of the cultural and spiritual dehumanization of colonized peoples that thinkers in the Pan-Africanist black radical tradition elaborated and worked out in the course of political struggles reflect the concerns of a critical jurisprudence – maybe not an alternative jurisprudence but a jurisprudence that is otherwise. 

His interest is to contemplate jurisprudence from the starting point of the black historical experience in the longue-duree; to engage the Pan-Africanist black radical tradition (specifically the Azanian political tradition) in order to interrogate and rethink the present – and in particular to challenge the historical, philosophical and political premises of the post-1994 South African legal and political order – particularly, as these are embodied and articulated in its constitution – which is often referred to as “the best constitution of the world”  - a designation that now increasingly rings hollow and facile as it appears more clearly that South Africa of Mandela and after Mandela remains a fundamentally unequal, unreconciled and unsettled society. Much of this turns on the unresolved and persistent fault-line of race – and the deep, enduring trauma it signifies in South African social relations and subject positions. As he will argue, this is a project that takes place at the ends of white jurisprudence in “Africa, South”.

This is event is being organised by the Decolonising the Law Discussion Group.