Melissa Steyn & William Mpofu 
Decolonising the Human [EPUB ebook] 
Reflections from Africa on difference and oppression

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions. The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.
Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.

قائمة المحتويات

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Chapter 1 The Trouble with the Human – William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn

Chapter 2 The Invention of Blackness on a World Scale – Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Patricia Pinky Nkete

Chapter 3 To What Extent Are We All Humans? Of Culture, Politics, Law and LGBT Rights in Nigeria – Olayinka Akanle, Gbenga S. Adejare and Jojolola Fasuyi

Chapter 4 Humanness and Ableism: Construction and Deconstruction of Disability – Sibonokuhle Ndlovu

Chapter 5 Doing the Old Human – Cary Burnett

Chapter 6 Being a Mineworker in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Decolonial Perspective – Robert Maseko

Chapter 7 Meditations on the Dehumanisation of the Slave– Tendayi Sithole

Chapter 8 ‘Language as Being’ in the Politics of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – Brian Sibanda

Chapter 9 The Underside of Modern Knowledge: An Epistemic Break from Western Science – Nokuthula Hlabangane

Chapter 10 The Fiction of the Juristic Person: Reassessing Personhood in Relation to People – C.D. Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara

Chapter 11 The Cultural Village and its Idea of the ‘Human’ – Morgan Ndlovu

Chapter 12 A Fragmented Humanity and Monologues: Towards a Diversal Humanism – Siphamandla Zondi

Contributors

Index

عن المؤلف

Siphamandla Zondi is a professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and coordinates the Department’s Institute for Strategic and Political Affairs.