Original Research

Decolonising the curricular’s disciplining methodologies’ quest to humanise the humanities

Lonwabo Kilani

Received: 17 Mar. 2025; Accepted: 21 Aug. 2025; Published: 01 Dec. 2025

Copyright: © 2025. The Author. Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

Searching for the humanity African descents lost through European colonisation, Post-1994 South Africa continues the struggles in large-scale protests that have become it’s defining feature. And not much in the way of scholarly rigour interrogates this antagonism. Privileging the narrative of hope as a humanistic approach for nation building, creative interventions from radical social movements have not been intellectually engaged as such, but have been characterised as backward and unlawful, therefore requiring violence as a mediating force. But the slow and constant growth of radical black studies in the midst of post-colonial scholarship has been met with academic resistance.

This is because the ‘post’ in the post-colonial is an open-ended accommodation that expands by way of inter- and trans-disciplinary scholarship required to conform to already established methodologies, while black studies pose more disciplinary challenges informed by anti-colonial-slavery movements. In this article, I argue that the call for ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and a decolonised curriculum was not for an expansion of the current disciplinary measures of learning rooted in colonial scholarship, but a push for an anti-colonial method of learning. I argue that current attempts at accommodating by way of expanding post-coloniality are rooted in the academy’s self-reflection’s self-perpetuating mechanism. I contend that there exists outside the academy what I call ‘creative radical interventions’ that come from black social movements. Land occupations that result from community protest such as the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student movement’s ‘Shackville’ was one of the many testing grounds at the call for an embrace for theories emanating from outside institutional disciplinary confines.

Contribution: As the curriculum expands towards more disciplines, with it comes methodologies which I posit cannot deal with what it means to accommodate protests that resist academic disciplinary measures. Looking at creative interventions from social movements, this article interrogates what it means to be creative beyond academic disciplinary confines.

Keywords: curriculum; black social movements; reason; decolonising methodology; creative interventions.

Suddenly a curricular object, ‘Black Studies’ was the name in the morning of a set of impulses that had been called the ‘movement’ only the night before. (Spillers 2003:3)

Introduction

And the above-stated quote, we will return to in a bit. Socialising institutions, particularly universities, and specifically the arts within the humanities are markers of legitimacy of politics as they develop and appear as creative imaginations. Sparked by the realisation that frameworks that currently attempt at unifying different forms of knowledges, even as they self-reflect, tend to realign in imperial formation that re-centred(s) in disciplinary ways, knowledges into knowledge. In the process of such re-alignments, new ‘political territories’, ‘geopolitical relations’ and therefore ‘new people’ (Gordon 2014:83) are formed. Such people, both centred and displaced by framework process and methods of humanisation and dehumanisation have come to define in extreme contrasting measures, white people and black people. At the same time, and, in the same vein, inbetweening a racial grade that borders the antagonistic racial formation made up of Coloured people and Indian people. Within this colonial formation of a new people, the centre becomes a zone for the human and its Other, and an outsider whose make-up disqualifies them of the status of the Other. The university’s structuring disciplinary methodologies of creative interventions into artistic forms itself re-align territories and relations anew. If the frameworks of alignments that make anew, a people and therefore ‘race’ is a practice of aligning knowledges into knowledge, Spillers (2003:29) is correct in asking ‘then what is it that is known? Transmitted habit? Mimetic conduct? The protocols of recognition and exclusion that are wordlessly, unconsciously established in reality as the type of reality itself?’ (1) That none of the knowledges turned knowledge are able to excavate black subjectivity is evidenced in the ‘habit’, ‘conduct’, and ‘protocols of recognition’. (2) Reason is yet to make a comeback since it left the room when blackness entered. (3) Therefore, disciplinary mechanisms lean, in the larger scheme of things, not on analogy but towards violence as a stabilising mechanism of these established categories.

Disciplines demand, if nothing else, consistency. A scientific application and an embrace of developed methods. Gordon (2014:85) identifies and differentiates between ‘consistency’ and ‘reason’, the former as rationality while calling for the embrace of contradictions found in latter. This is the yoke of the natural and human sciences. If reason, as Gordon frames it, is an embrace of contradictions, then Spillers (2003:3)’ observation of the academy’s sudden embrace of ‘Black Studies’ from movements-cum-curricular object should not be read in contradictory terms, but in how, as Gordon (2014:85) formulates it, an ‘effort to colonise reason’. In his important offering on what he terms ‘disciplinary decadence’, Gordon grapples with what he argues is a fetishisation of disciplinary methodologies on forms of knowledges over reality that more than often, exceeds the disciplines’ scope of inquiry. In this case, while black studies itself is a realignment that encompasses various de-colonial knowledges, its sudden embrace as a curricular object should, more importantly, be the lived contradiction with the black radical movement.

After the enlightenment philosophies responsible for the anti-black carnage that is Western modernity, both slavery and colonialism, most critical artistic efforts to formulate a language of resistance and justice have failed to articulate the position of black people as an antagonistic relation to white supremacy. This might explain why emancipatory strategies keep falling short after more than 500 years. Efforts shaped in the language of ethics around class, gender and race approach the problem of black absence as an issue of representation rather than an impossibility to be represented. Instead, liberatory ideologies, including Marxism, liberal feminism, slave, prison abolition and anti-apartheid and colonial narratives have shifted the narrative that demands a deeper understanding of the antagonisms that structure the world of white supremacy and anti-blackness to that of hopefulness. It is this narrative of hope that has resulted in today’s post-ism of life after slavery, colonisation and apartheid rather than an end to it. What sustains this hope or optimism lies in the structure of contemporary modern institutions that legitimise the world as we know it. From humanitarian and philanthropic initiatives of Western democratic nations, the call for a more humane world tends to override the meaning of demands for justice in a world responsible for anti-blackness. Such a call demands that we interrogate the meaning of humanity for those whose existence is always in question.

The language of law informed by white fears and desires forms such a world in the make-up of its institutions. What makes possible the real from the imaginary is what differentiates the absence of blackness from the presence of whiteness. The judicial law, as an instrument of the state and white power, does not recognise the being of the black,¹ in other words the humanity of black people, it becomes necessary then to question the creative and philosophical make-up of such institutions. Existential enquiries are as much philosophical questions of desire whose creative expression determines what it means to be human. Such questions, ethical questions of human rights, I argue, are largely generated in the humanities and social sciences as a structure that determines culture or our sense of being. In other words, humanities and social sciences question and generate morals and ethics that later become law.

Based on this theoretical foundation, I will now turn to the language of protest or creative interventions in black protests. Black demands are framed in the language of ethics such as human rights, decent toilets, housing, jobs, gender equality, freedom of expression and so on, while the language of response by instruments of the State reminds black protesters of the antagonisms that exist at the level of ontology. By virtue of its inability to be recognised within the frameworks of the legal standards of modern institutions, as a creative expression, black protest demands representation for recognition and visibility. However, visibility alone does not give us a deeper understanding of black ontological absence. Instead, hypervisibility becomes the mode for re-enacting and desensitising anti-black violence. In this article, I argue then that visual representation, or the demand for visibility demanded by black creatives, cannot translate into Stepelevich’s reading of Hegel’s (1999) notion of the ‘ethics of recognition’ (p. 174) backed by modern legal law, because, as the basic constituent of modernity, anti-blackness is its thesis. Therefore, my thesis is that black protest should be antithetical to modes of recognition and rather deepen our understanding of the impossibility for recognition.

Protest landscapes

Given the widening economic inequality that operates along racial lines, post-1994 South Africa has become globally notorious for its protests. Such a gap results from the failure to implement the promised structural change for the betterment of the black majority by the ruling party. One’s eye simply needs to scan and navigate the broader South African landscape,² the rural and the urban, to view the vast difference between the poor black majority in contrast with the wealthy white minority: the rural black areas and the urban townships compared to white farms and white suburbia.

Most if not all ‘successful’ protest occupations do not signal an end to the protest culture, but most likely the beginning. Habitable humane environments that make up a modern community allude to a functioning basic system for basic human needs – housing, water, roads, electricity, schools and so on. Failure to provide such basic human needs leads to ‘inhumane conditions’ in which the struggle to make meaningful the lives of the people occupying and making life in these landscapes is a battle zone.

There is something uncanny about how unshaken and unmoved the government becomes when community protests tear apart the same community that demands service delivery. A burnt library, a scorched and cracked tarred road, a looted shop and the spilling of trash tend to have little to no effect on the broader South African landscape. Besides, for the unaffected elite class, life goes on.

This nonchalant behaviour of the government towards the destruction of black communities’ structures, amenities and environments points to the history that South Africa is built on. The wars fought between the British and the Boers³ leading to the formation of the Union of South Africa was a battle of two occupying powers. Policies in place were structured such that they would benefit both the British and the Boers. In this process, the majority of the population (black people) would be affected only as policed rather than policy makers. This 1910 formation that unified the Cape, Transvaal, Natal and the Orange River to become the Union of South Africa legislated relations between black people and white people. This did not deter the black majority from wars of land reclaim. It is between the reclaiming of the commons by way of protest and policy-making against those policed that the landscape is in constant transformation. These clashes over land and policies are creative initiatives where being and non-being is determined. They inscribe and describe between those who belong and those who do not. Belonging does not only become a matter of material access to resources; it is an inscription of a body schema that makes and unmakes an ontology. What is taken away from one group, such as land and humanity, is legislated to the other. In this article, I argue that the post-apartheid period does not unmake these relations. Instead, progressive institutions and ideologies fail to interrogate the antagonism that makes such relations.

We witness this failure veiled by the narrative of hope. Prior to the ascendancy of the African National Congress (ANC) democratic government in 1994, the narrative of hope has always been around in overt and explicit forms. It came as hope clothed in the concealing language of dispossession. When the piece of segregation legislation, the Native Land Act of 1913 that relegated black people to less than 20% of the land was implemented, it came under the concept of separate development. In the present, the notion of ‘authentic Black home’ or belonging is largely viewed from the perspective of the apartheid homelands divisions. The idea was that black people need not mix with white people and therefore should have tribal territories specifically for them while they were made illegal immigrants in the rest of their ancestral country. At the same time, black people who moved into the urban areas in search for work were moved from areas they occupied ‘informally’ and strategically placed in what later became ‘formal’ townships. Such townships would then be ‘developed’ into small brick houses and, as a result, positively named Gugulethu [our pride] and Khayelitsha [new home] to name a few. Khayelitsha, located in the Western Cape, is a Xhosa word for ‘new home’. It is said to be the third largest township in South Africa after Soweto (Gauteng province) and Mdantsane (Eastern Cape province). The settlement was a result of forced removal of black people from crossroads (informal settlement) and other surrounding informal settlements to the newly built brick houses by the apartheid government in 1985. It is these seemingly ‘positive developments’ that I argue give a false sense of hope. They do not escape the intended consequences of apartheid but legitimate them.

Between the formal and the informal, the past and the present, the fluidity of history as a form of progress and movement in time itself seems stationary – static. The universality of Khayelitsha as the form that breeds and hosts the formless, the particular that results from protest – eNkanini and eNdlovini – itself collapses into one. Nkanini and Ndlovini, located in the Western Cape, are terms generally denoting forcefulness and are informal settlements that form part of Khayelitsha. Nkanini means cheekiness, and Ndlovini means ‘stomping in like an elephant’. These form part of many communities around South Africa resulting from protests for land redistribution post-1994. They are largely formed by renting backyarders and youth seeking independence from home. It is in this collapse that the form and the formless, the formal with the informal occupy the same spatial dimension of abjection. Put differently, the language of hope presented in the form of ‘formal townships’ such as Khayelitsha collapses in the extension of ‘informal townships’ that result from protest communities. As a result, the notion of historical progress, of a movement in time, itself warps. Instead, the creative naming of these protest communities becomes a call back to the real, a refusal of the falsehood of hopefulness back to the abjection of blackness.

The post-1994 dispensation was presented rather as an opportunity to heal, individually and as groups, as black people and white people. It is often argued that we must find our common humanity that gets lost in the process of dehumanisation. Here, the perpetrator is as dehumanised by the violence they inflict and therefore as deserving of regaining his or her humanity. Humanities then become the sanctuary where ethics and morals of these processes are explored. We see this manifest in several leaders who, at the end of their service as chiefs-in-command, not only administer therapeutic art for themselves, but to those whom their policies have greatly mangled. Upon exiting from his admiral post at the end of May 1915, in his search for change to remedy his mental over-strain, Churchill (1948) found solace in a newly discovered passion for painting (p. 7). At first, his approach was cautious as he tried to negotiate with his subject in tiny strokes using a small brush. He is later inspired by a friend, Lady Hazel Lavery, to approach it more boldly. Despite seeing painting as a new language of expression, what he discovered in principle is how:

[…P]ainting a picture is like fighting a battle; and trying to paint a picture is … like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same. It is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long-sustained argument. (Churchill 1948:9)

In his observation of Lady Lavery’s approach to the canvas, he narrates the scene as a duel: the canvas was fatally losing as Lady Lavery fiercely stroked and slashed ‘on the cowering canvas’ (Churchill 1948:9). Between the painter and the Commander-in-Chief, Churchill read both their positions filling the same obligation, where the canvas and the landscape required the same strategic plan and reconnaissance. It was in the ability of the French language to speak of love, war, diplomacy or cooking that his admiration for its development and achievement was ‘precise and complete’.

Churchill’s philosophical proposition that it is never too late to take up painting as a pastime would inspire yet another former Commander-in-Chief whose work would convey his presidency, the family man and the affectionate philanthropist. In his series of portraits ‘The art of leadership: A president’s personal diplomacy’, former United States (US) President George Bush talks about his personal intimate relationships with world leaders. The series depicts and reflects his personal feelings which are not divorced from US policies regarding matters concerning geopolitical concerns. Bush’s distaste for the former Soviet country and geopolitical rival leader Vladimir Putin is toiled in his depiction with the same contrasting vigour for his friend and political ally, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. While his family paintings are talked about in a less detailed manner, we read a sense of privacy accompanying the work. Instead, intended to give hope, as a kind gesture for injured veterans of the Iraq war under his administration, a 98-portraits series, ‘Portraits of courage’ – whose catalogue proceeds go to the Bush Centre’s vets’ programme – was an intimate gesture for those unknown faces, now portrayed in the short documentary Evidence of things unseen,⁴ in need of recovery both physically and mentally. Here, Bush provides a platform for self-expression that the protagonist (Richard) needed. But this expression does not account for war crimes committed. It becomes an expression for its own sake where this need for the patients’ speech demands self-diagnosis. I am interested in art’s capacity or incapacity to heal through speech, and how speech functions as a mediating medium in the world structured by white supremacy and anti-black antagonisms.

At play here is a twofold question: What is the language of black radical creative expression that is informed by or informs black desires for freedom, and what makes such desires impossible to translate into law? Here, I explore speech and its creative manifestations in its capacities to be coerced and its inabilities and abilities for refusal. I am interested in protests that have manifested in black communities and how they are positioned and position themselves in their relation to structures of white power while exposing anti-blackness.

They challenge legalities in relation to black bodies. What then do we make of the laws that govern the parameters between non-violent, disruptive and violent protest? What do we make of the language of intervention used by Cyril Ramaphosa, current president of South Africa, in his correspondence with Lonmin’s chief commercial officer Albert Jamieson before that fateful day of the Marikana massacre⁵? Ramaphosa (2014) declared:

The terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labour dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterised as such … there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation. (Desai 2014:Miners Shot Down [47:30])

Does this language not sound like the characterisation of the #RhodesMustFall’s demand for the decolonised curriculum as a return to barbarism? So, I take moments of radical protests characterised outside legal parameters as creative moments of refusal rather than aspirations towards radical political art expression.

Interiority and exteriority of creativity in protest

Attempts at shaking and destabilising established narratives form part of the natural state of the arts. With every concrete framework lies the question of the Other whose narrative resides in the margins. This Other of the arts is generally generated in cultural and political difference, often found in hierarchal elitist frameworks that get called into question. Art, as much as it is framed ambiguously open and non-definitive, defines the pinnacle of what becomes creative mastery. Creativity is largely distributed in different forms. There is the technical (creatively crafty) and the thought process (generating dialogue). It is with the fraught notions and language of dialogue that contemporary artists and art collectives push against established artistic frameworks. According to Kester (2005), they move away from objects to ‘provide context’ rather than ‘provide content’. Kester is interested in community formations, collaborations and dialogue beyond art institutional boundaries. In his introduction Conversation pieces: The role of dialogue in socially-engaged art, Kester is interested in artistic interventions where dialogue with said communities becomes part of the artistic process whose goal is solving real social situations as they relate to policy and other socio-political issues. For Kester, these networks of communities begin to develop different knowledges and aesthetic experiences. It is this artform he describes, according to Homi K. Bhabha, as ‘conversational art’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of art as ‘dialogical’. As an attempt to move away from modernist and postmodernist art theory of work developed for an audience, Kester gravitates towards artforms open-endedly developed in consultation with the community by developing what he calls ‘Socially Engaged Art’. Rasmunssen (2017:52) generally describes socially engaged art as socio-political art interventions that form dialogues in conflict-ridden urban spaces outside the art institution.

Socially engaged art comes from a long tradition of art historical institutional critique, from conceptual art to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Rasmunssen (2017:62) traces their lineage from the interventionist art of the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Modes of art institutional critique remain by all means secure within the bounds of art institutions; be it galleries, museums, biennales and others. Socially engaged art and relational aesthetics appear in mid-1990s and early 2000s as a later vestige of what Rasmunssen deems art criticism, institutional attachment and artistic practice-based dialogue. Kenyan born and raised Ambole’s (2018) self-critical reflections on her public and development management PhD at Stellenbosch grapples with notions of outsider/insider with South African Black township and lived experience forms an internal dialogue and an ethical attempt at analysing ones position accordingly.

Between the two artistic forms, socially engaged art pushes beyond institutional boundaries by communicating in dialogue, social issues outside such confines and directly with the effected communities. However, although these collaborative interventions and dialogues cross over towards political activism, and/or social work, they remain artistic-themed initiatives by artists with or for said communities. Rasmunssen views the dialogic approach as empathetic recognition of the other and questions this notion of the artist as collaborator. He argues:

There is a problematic privileging of consensus and intersubjectivity here that tends to recoil from more radical or ‘unreasoned’ demands that are less interested in establishing a dialogue or empathy than in making visible processes of exclusion and lines of fracture that do not disappear because the artist (and the critic) have good intentions and wish to mobilise a local community. (Rasmunssen 2017:70)

Now, we begin to move along the line where notions of open dialogue begin to crumble and fall apart. When the unreasoned comes into play, or to be correct, refuses reason within certain institutional confines and assumptive logic, then appears an aura of futility. The artist’s role as a collaborator and initiator begins to be in question.

Rasmunssen argues that among the artforms intended to question institutional integrity, be it relational aesthetics, institutional critiques or socially engaged art, none have managed to fully escape recuperation and co-option: Gordon’s (2014) ‘disciplinary decadence⁶’ (p. 86). But among them, Rasmunssen credits Kester’s online journal Field: A journal of socially-engaged art criticism⁷ for the survival and relevance of socially engaged art. In spite of Kester’s attempts at decentring artistic activism away from traditional art institutions for art-based field analysis, Rasmunssen (2017) remains critical in that this expansion merely shifts geographical diversity of ‘already existing canon instead of an attempt to dismantle it’ (p. 68). Furthermore, Rasmunssen warns of the dangers of replacing revolutionary concepts for ‘micro-politics’ and ‘micro-utopias’ in what he calls ‘the art of modest proposal’ (p. 71) where the settlement lies in small adjustments rather than fundamental change. It is this expansion of the canon towards an inter-disciplinary or cross-disciplinary art-form applicable to the formations of the curriculum this article resists. As such, I propose a counter or an anti-art-discipline study of black radical protest in what I call ‘creative radical interventions’ informed by its own universality. A proposition that refuses a stray against what Spillers saw as a movement turned curricula object.

I argue that black creativity is not an external feature of black radical movement to be sourced in institutionally formalised artistic forms, but foundational in the universality of black radical protest. With the apartheid past and its laws behind us, the right to protest is entrenched in Section 17 of the post-1994 South African Constitution. Carin Runciman defines three categories of protest: (1) peaceful, (2) disruptive, and (3) violent. Peaceful protest defines non-violent marches and rallies usually with the formal go-ahead of the government. Disruptive protest, although there might be an ambiguity bordering on violence, is seen as non-violent but with disruptive behaviour such as blocking roads and unlawfully occupying spaces. Violent protest refers to destruction of properties and injuring others. However, Lancaster reads an ambiguous tone in the definition of violence as stated in the South African common law, that it is:

[T]he unlawful and intentional performance by a number of persons of an act or acts which assumes serious proportions and are intended to disturb public peace and order by violent means, or to infringe the rights of another. (Lancaster 2016:2)

Studies in the hierarchy of South African protests suggest that a large segment of the protesting population leans towards more peaceful protest engagements, but finds violent protests to yield results. A brief statistical evaluation conducted by the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) between 1995 and 2017 includes South African Social Attitude Survey (SASAS) conducted in the first 3 months of 2017 and shows a shift from peaceful protest towards more violent protest. Not in principle but because of success (Bohler-Muller et al. 2017:84–86).

One thing clear is that the post-1994 South African Constitution makes provision for the airing of disgruntlement within a particular threshold. Important emphasis seems to be on non-interference or disruption of the everyday running of the world where the protest takes place. In other words, people can protest, but life must go on. Protests have therefore become nationally legislated interventions.

During the time of the #RhodesMustFall protest, we witnessed several interventions that can easily be categorised as artistic in their interrogation. Dean Hutton’s work, the Golden dean performance, attracted a backlash from black student activists who argued that Dean’s presence intensified the invisibility of black people who are already marginalised. Sethembile Msezane’s piece The day Rhodes fell, rose prominently as the chiselled stone, was being removed for safety to an undisclosed location for storage. In their own contexts, they celebrate and challenge certain representations around politics of power. Both are artists whose genre of political art is celebrated before and after these interventions. They are works that deal ethically with questions of representation. Grant Kester’s (2005:4) frustration with the current artistic modes of critique is that certain theoretical positions are subscribed to rather than engaged. In his approach, he is interested in activist artistic intervention that operates outside what he calls the ‘textual register’. Kester is interested in questions outside the standard art historical theory, the more open-ended interactive works rather than pre-programmed artistic interventions.

However, if we look closely at the self-regulatory state mechanisms both as human rights and in law, we quickly realise that they are not equipped with the language that deals ethically with black people. As we have become accustomed to the evictions of the homeless and informal occupants of the commons, ‘Shackville’ – a protest that took place in 2016 at University of Cape Town (UCT) through setting up of shacks – was demolished. I want to argue that the inability to recognise the protest performance ‘Shackville’ as an artwork or at least creative radical intervention is because it does not fall within the categories and conventions of the art world. At the time, it was not what Spillers would have called a curricular object. It was not a work made by those deemed artists and therefore it did not possess codes visible to the establishment. To add salt to the wound, the act, and/or the artworks bonfire performance from paintings protesting students deemed offensive from the institution’s walls itself further exacerbated notions of ignorance and barbarism, while the violent demolition of Shackville and manhandling and arresting of protesting students by private security was necessary routine against damage to institution’s property. Through the Shackville intervention, #RhodesMustFall movement taps into the zone of unreasoned demands Rasmunssen alludes to. But this is not to argue for these creative radical interventions as fitting the mould of artistic expression; on the contrary, for why they cannot and should not be viewed as such from an institutional point of view since they retain the status of the movement that resists curriculum’s disciplinary methods of creative expression. More importantly is how these creative radical interventions in themselves demand that we read them as a language of refusal.

Does this division not speak to the poignant question of language as a structure of socialisation that Žižek asks;

What if, however, humans exceeded animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? When we perceive something as an act of violence, we measure it by a presupposed standard of what the ‘normal’ non-violent situation is – and the highest form of violence is the imposition of this standard with reference to which some events appear as ‘violent’. This is why language itself, the very medium of non-violence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence. So the fact that reason (ratio) and race have the same root tells us something; language, not primitive egotistic interests, is the first and greatest divider. It is because of language that we and our neighbours (can) ‘live in different worlds’ even when we live in the same street. What this means is that the verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence. (Žižek 2008:61)

Language is a regulating mechanism between humans. It is a gap that draws and opens boundaries. As such, it is not autonomous. As a violent mechanism, it is often used as a justification in its own terms like countries and states. Think of the language of human rights. In his YouTube conversation with Kelley, Moten (2017:03) argues that states in themselves do not have the legitimacy to exist but are meant to protect the rights of their citizens – in themselves, they have no rights. He further argues against the presupposition that protesting the state of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism, in that by the likes of Donald Trump’s support of Israel, ‘the two are not antithetical to one another but go together’. Therefore ‘resistance to the State of Israel is a resistance to the legitimacy of the nation state’. Peaceful protest then becomes a playground for social pathologies.

If art’s primary function is to make representable symbolic forms for human desires and anxieties, then language and ontology, two ingredient elements meant for such representation and dialogue, should possess codes visible as such. In the last paragraph of his concluding text ‘Theory in Black: Theological Suspension in Philosophy of Culture’, Gordon (2010) concludes that ‘Art … is the construction of human presence’ (p. 210). Blackness, many philosophers, theorists of black studies and revolutionaries have argued, lacks both language and ontological integrity in the white world. In other words, blackness lacks symbolic integrity that gives presence a condition of possibility. While most agree on the lack of ontological integrity, there is an argument for urgency among others who read and analyse certain historical moments and events as positive accomplishments in the fight against anti-blackness. The former pessimistically intensifies every positive outcome, and the latter optimistically takes score. In other words, pessimists take the metanarrative to its logical conclusion, while optimists see certain historical moments (e.g., the ANC coming into power) as conditions of possibility. Steve Biko saw black consciousness as a positive step towards self-realisation. Frantz Fanon saw no possibility for symbolic attainment achievable under white supremacy. Gordon’s (2010) notion of the ‘dark side of theory … as self-reflective’ (197) provides a positive internal critique of self. Fred Moten takes certain historical moments as creative improvisations that put agency in the fight for liberation. Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton and David Marriott are among the few theorists who approach blackness as a consistent position of enslavement rather than historical moments of upheavals. Saidiya Hartman’s work is an allegory of today’s black condition to that of slavery. Spillers bridges the gap that divides race and gender categories.

As such, ‘seeing Black’, or to ‘see in Black’, as Gordon (2010:197) has argued ‘has the mythopoetics of sin’. Taking into consideration notions of language and ontology, art’s function and construction as a vehicle for representation and visibility lacks the necessary ingredient to make appear, blackness. Black radical protest, in all its creative endeavours, can only reveal the impossible makeup of artistic language as its primary mode.

In his chapter ‘Function and field of speech and language’ Lacan (1989:44) makes the argument that psychoanalysis’s ‘only medium’ is a ‘patient’s speech’. And that ‘All speech calls for a reply’ (p. 44). Now, if we begin to assess black radical protest demands in psychoanalytic terms as a patient in speech, it is important to pay careful attention to the reply of such a speech. For Gordon (2010), ‘for Black speech to appear requires a relationship to reason that brings its melancholy to the fore’ (p. 210). The same reason, according to Fanon, that leaves the room when the black enters. What is left then as a response can only be violence. This is where Wilderson III (2008:98) can only read ‘Black presence as a form of absence’; he views it as an ‘ontological frieze awaiting gaze’ not the ‘living ontology in the field of vision’. As such he designates this absence in all layers of black life – ‘Cartographic, subjective, and political’. A setting up of curriculum has to take into consideration these layers as they apply to post-1994 black protests and the responses they attract from state institutions (particularly the university). Currently, the formation that extends and stretches artistic practices in its inter/and trans-disciplines, no matter how creative such moments, art as a designating symbolic order of recognition has not given a reasonable account that can claim to make appear the being of blackness.

Conclusion

At the heart of most black artistic protests and movements in contemporary politics are issues of representation often, if not always, evoked by exclusionist narratives that displace different ethnic groups into a race and unify in colonial ways their knowledges into knowledge. If we are to take Spiller’s concerns seriously around the consistently shifting ground that displaced the movement from street protest to an object of study that has lost what she terms ‘mystical qualities’ because curricular methodologies compel it to ‘meditate on its reasons’, then we would stay away from what she reads blackness as a ‘process’ and a ‘strategy’ in the quest for philosophy of symbolic disobediences (2003:3–5). As it is with Gordon, this position does not sway away from reason‘s embrace of contradictions. For, the curricular object, if loyal to its movements as its knowledges cum knowledge, presents a source of philosophy of symbolic disobediences.

That the protest culture of creative radical interventions as the forceful land occupations and Shackville have proven to yield some result is testament to the refusal to conform, and push for those impossible demands. Despite abiding by the necessary scientific and methodological publication requirements, this is an analysis and an investigation that take the form of and are positioned along anti-disciplinary protest. The importance of positioning black radical protest outside the discipline of the art is important in that current methods of representation colonise by incorporation rather than liberate.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the ‘University of Cape Town (UCT) Office for Inclusivity and Change’ for providing the necessary support and resource making it possible to publish this article.

The author reported that they received funding for publication from the University of Cape Town that may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed publication. The author has disclosed those interests fully and has in place an approved plan for managing any potential conflicts arising from that involvement.

L.K. is the sole author of this research article.

This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.

The author has disclosed the receipt of financial support for the publication of this article by the University of Cape Town.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article, as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. The article does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency or the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings and content.

References

Footnotes

1. Black: When I talk about the being of the black, I speak of the humanity of black people. By black people, I mean a racial group designated not just outside of the superstructure that constitutes white supremacy, but those that do not fit even within what Biko called substandard races or non-white people, for example Indians and Coloureds and others. Within this realm on non-white people, Biko alluded to those black people who collaborated with white institutions in the dehumanisation of black people and other oppressed people (Biko 1987:48-49).

2. However, the situation is simply not as clear-cut. A growth in what has been termed petty bourgeois black middle class has been rampant despite the argument that the so-called broader black middle class is a pay-check away from poverty. In his News24 article ‘Measuring South Africa’s (black) middle class’, Markus Korhonen argues that South Africa has a vague definition of what it means to be middle class that leads to it being ‘somewhere between the rich and the poor’ (Korhonen 2018:05). According to Korhonen (2018), 24.5% of the participants who took part in a World Value Survey who identified as middle class ‘had “often” gone without enough food to eat in the past year’ – standards not akin to a middle-class lifestyle. It is through these ambiguities that we cannot define nor determine what a South African middle class is. What we cannot deny, though, is that the measuring standards have not prevented the country from always being on the verge of eruption as a political expression, which demands creative strategies.

3. Boers, is an Afrikaans word for early Dutch settlers, the Free Burgers who first arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

4. CreatiVets is an organisation for post-traumatic Iraqi war veterans that functions as a platform to use the arts as a healing mechanism. Evidence of Things Unseen is a documentary on this organisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1pyzAUR9Ns.

5. In the North West province in Marikana: On 16 August 2012, SAPS (South African Police Service) opened fire on striking Lonmin (London Mine) platinum mineworkers killing 34 and injuring 78.

6. Lewis Gordon argues that an enforcing of discipline as a scientific methodology is an attempt at colonising reason. This is because methodology requires rationality and consistency, while reason has contradictions and exceptions. It is because of this failure in recognising the discipline’s own limitations necessitated by living thought (this instance Black) that forces such decadence.

7. Field: A journal of socially engaged art. Founded by Grant Kester in 2014. https://field-journal.com/.