1016 FROM SCHREINER TO BIKO: A HUNDRED YEARS OF THINKING AGAINST RACE

Professor Crain Soudien, academic and administrator

Beginning with Hannah Arendt and Keith Breckinridge’s claim that South Africa is a ‘culture bed’ for imperialism, this double lecture presents the counter-claim that it is also an important site for the development of anti-racism, both as an idea and a practice. The lecture focuses on resistance, and will sketch the outlines of the arguments, positions and practices that have emerged against South Africa’s racialised bureaucracy. In doing so, it will describe a point of view that evolves from the thinking of Olive Schreiner to that of Steve Biko. The lecture will show that there is a very distinctive, immensely complex anti-racist genealogy emerging in South Africa which will serve as a creative counter ‘culture bed’.

LECTURE TITLES

1.    Schreiner to the New Era Fellowship

2.    The non-racial movement to Black Consciousness

Recommended reading

Alexander, N. 2002. An ordinary country: issues of transition for apartheid to democracy in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Breckinridge, K. 2014. The biometric state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dubow, S. 1995. Scientific racism in modern South Africa. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.

Dubow, S. 2006. A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.