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I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape ...

But ... I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream ... I am thinking of it as home ... a suitable term because ... [it] domesticates the racial project, moves the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yearning and futile desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably non-existent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity.

TONI MORRISON

‘Home’, 1997

... the grammatical form of the human is not that of the subject, whether nominal or pronominal, but that of the verb.

TIM INGOLD

The Life of Lines, 2015

RACE MATTERS. IT MATTERS because of the meanings we give to it. How and why race has come to matter, and how and why we continue to make race matter, has to do with ways in which history, power and politics shape the frames within which meaning is made, contested and renegotiated.

The foundation of the enduring effects of race lies in the racialisation of what it means to be human. The human is not ontologically given in a way that is independent of the mind. We create our human-ness as we open ourselves up in the interactive presence of other sentient and non-sentient beings. We forge our human-ness in the midst of changing social forces and power relations (historical, cultural, political, psycho-social, scientific and economic) and over the duration of our lives. These constellations of social forces produce particular interpretive frames and practices with which we make meaning of the human. If becoming human is something we do with other humans and with other sentient and non-sentient beings, then, in the words of Tim Ingold, ‘to human is a verb’. Where there are humans, ‘what goes on is humaning’ (Ingold 2015: 115-20).

Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others. To humanise is to impose upon the world a preconceived meaning of the human (Ingold 2015: 115-20). There is no one way of humaning. There is no perfect way of going about it. Humaning is a social and cultural practice which we constantly hone. Humaning as praxis is historically and contextually specific.

Pre-modern European ways of seeing continue to shape conceptions of human difference in the West and in worlds formerly colonised by Europe. The manner in which these ways of seeing linked cultural practices to genealogy can be understood as antecedents to conceptions of race – or protoracial conceptions – that were recrafted over time. The use of skin colour and ancestry to make social distinctions among humans circulated prior to the onset of modernity. However, the violence of the first colonial conquest of the Americas in 1492 ushered in a long history of turning these pre-modern ways of making social distinctions into technologies of disciplinary power that permeate European constructions of the Other and Eurocentric ways of knowing. The modern idea of race – a composite of skin colour, ancestry, culture and geography – is key to these technologies of power. From the nineteenth century racialised hierarchies of the human were naturalised by Western science and reinscribed into the juridical, economic, administrative, knowledge and symbolic realms of societies structured in terms of colonial dominance (S. Hall 1980). In the Western imagination, European Man came to personify the human. European modes of humanising – by way of its civilising mission – came to dominate the world. Thus, the relationship between processes of racialisation and the emergence of dominant conceptions of what it means to be human is constitutive. As from the nineteenth century race is the code through which one knows what it means to be human, and through which one experiences the effects of this meaning (see David Scott’s interview with Sylvia Wynter, Scott 2000: 183).

This book is less about racism as a structure of power and more about specific processes of racialisation, namely, processes of making meaning that are framed by the history and the politics from which this structure of power emerges. In this book I challenge three normative ways of knowing integral to practices of racialisation: the look, the category and the gene. I grapple with ways one might think about the inside of racialised social life as a space from which new arts of coming to know and new arts of making meaning can emerge. All of us live in amongst racialised structures of social meaning. We cannot be outside, above, or beyond the past and the present. Nor can we be outside, above, or beyond race. Because we are embedded in a racialised world, its ways of seeing and its injustices can be apparent to us, and we can be inspired to change it.

I take up a challenge offered by the writer Toni Morrison. For her, the racial house we live in does not have to be ‘a windowless prison’. Nor should we wait for the perfect liberation theory to do the work of ‘un-mattering race’ (Morrison 1997: 3-4). In the ongoing process of our liberation we must create openings in the racial house. We must refuse to live by its rules of dominance and its significations. We must refuse to ‘bleed the raced house for the gains it provides in authenticity and insiderdom’ (1997: 11). This demands that we figure out ways to make definitive statements about why race matters ‘while depriving it of its lethal cling’. My book is born of this struggle for ‘race-specificity without race prerogative’ (1997: 5).

I hold four productive tensions in this book: first, a tension between the assumed visibility of race, and ways of coming to know and engaging with meanings of race that challenge this assumption; second, a tension between the rigidity of race categories and the possibilities open for new ways of seeing Self and Other; third, a tension between the use of genetic ancestry tests to confirm racialised identities, and ongoing processes of making anew the Self and the social; and fourth, a tension between narratives understood as ‘merely stories’, and the narrative form as a mode of coming to know and an analytical and conceptual tool that is integral to understanding processes of racialisation (Kreiswirth 2000). These tensions demand a double politics: to acknowledge the ways in which race continues to matter, while working towards its undoing. I use the protocols of academic writing and bend these to my purpose: to produce a located understanding (and an equally located disruption) of normative ways of knowing race, and to reveal the ways in which race is both constructed and ‘real’, in the sense that it means something to social subjects, and that this meaning is valid not because it is the only or final meaning, but because it is a way of making sense of the world. In the words of Toni Morrison, this means ‘to be both free and situated’ (1997: 5).

Each tension permits a way of coming to know otherwise – an epistemic shift or movement. Adversarial manoeuvres open the cracks in taken-for-granted ideas about race, reveal and attempt to address its unjust effects, and disrupt repeated reliance on the prism of race. Creolisation transforms identifications congealed in contexts of dominance and loosens up new possibilities of seeing Self and Other. Sociogenesis reveals that race is neither on nor in the body, but lives in the words and meanings that surround it. My writing strategy in this book is best described as writer-telling: the use of narrative to illuminate the practice and effects of making racial meaning and to invite the epistemic work required to live with racialised difference otherwisely, that is, to think in ways that take into account the wisdom of Others in the search for ways of making meaning that do not revert to race by default.

The first three arts of coming to know otherwise shatter the long-established and reiterated connection between race and the human in Western notions of human difference. My conception of the human is located in words and meanings that emerge from tangled, circuitous relations, not through sequential lines of ancestral, cultural, genetic or bureaucratic transmission. These words and meanings are born of beginnings, not of origins that bestow properties and dispositions on human beings in advance of living. These words and meanings turn towards the future while accounting for the past. Writer-telling, the fourth art of coming to know otherwise, elucidates my academic argument with narrative and reconfigures conventional ways (that rely on hierarchical and compartmentalised conceptions of knowledge) of producing, disseminating and recognising the meaning and significance of knowledge in the human sciences. The division between fact and fiction is the most rudimentary form of such conceptions. I introduce aimance – political love – as a fifth art of coming to know that enables what it means to be human, to unfold in the presence of others.

There are four reasons why this book is perhaps best seen as a contribution to the human, more than the social sciences, a distinction made by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, the editors of the journal History of the Human Sciences (see Kreiswirth 2000). It is informed by a critical and historical approach. It attempts to move beyond critique towards making new knowledge. It defies disciplinary boundaries. And, it attends to (at least some) philosophical, literary, legal and political concerns in its exploration of normative and possible ways of coming to know race (Kreiswirth 2000).

This book and its chapters are arabesque.¹ Their structure bears witness to the thesis of the book: to change racialised ways of coming to know the world and of coming to know what it means to be human requires an epistemic shift from genealogical knowing to sociogenic ways of coming to know. Metaphorically, humaning involves lines of thought and journeys that curve towards, wrap around, lean against and hold onto each other in their movement towards a vocabulary for (re-)thinking race.

I begin with an autobiographical chapter as an opening to my lived experience of a particular non-hegemonic way of giving meaning to blackness. ‘This Blackness’ shows the ways in which history, politics and theory are embedded in and integral to biography. I give readers a sense of the place from which I write, think and (try to) act – a place constituted by a web of multiple thresholds and moulded by four globally significant historical conjunctures: South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts, its transition to democracy in April 1994, and its increasingly complex post-1994 reality. This first chapter reveals what has become for me, in this moment, a place of critique from which I attempt to live (not always with success) alongside racialised prescriptions of history and of the present.

I include family photographs in my book as a way of bringing to life particular aspects of this autobiographical chapter. While I am aware of critical scholarship on the production and use of family photo albums, particularly the positioning of intimate relations as Other, I do not engage this literature here.² Suffice it to say that this awareness is amplified by my critique of ‘the look’ as a normative practice of racialisation. Given that the book as a whole provides a context for this selection of photographs, I leave it to readers to be conscious of what it is they ‘look for’ and what it is they ‘look at’ when engaging with the photographs.

Chapters two through six are the core of this text. In ‘A Conversation’ I begin by outlining a frame – provided by the poet and literary scholar, Harry Garuba (2008) – for thinking about race and Africa. Garuba considers the uses of the modern idea of race in Africa, responses to these uses of race, and their implications for racialised consciousness. In the remainder of this chapter, I digest yesterday’s thought and practice in order to nourish new modes of each. Here I highlight some of the first subaltern histories of and intellectual responses from South Africa to colonial uses of race. I show the kinds of questions that Garuba’s frame enables when thinking about counter-discourses to race in South Africa. This provides a backdrop against which I locate this book in relation to particular political and intellectual traditions.

In the chapters that follow – ‘The Look’, ‘The Category’ and ‘The Gene’ – I reveal the ways in which these normative ways of knowing translate into practices of racialisation. Each chapter delineates the contours of the place where the subject’s capacity to change these racialising practices chafes against the rough edges of taken-for-granted ways of knowing and of working with race. The space inside these contours is where the subject opens up to other orders of making meaning of race, where old logics of race rub up against new logics to create productive tensions that are negotiated with a double politics. Inside each of these spaces, which I visualise as cocoons, an other way of coming to know and of coming to engage with race – through adversarial manoeuvres, creolisation, sociogenesis – emerges from these tensions. This is where new ways of coming to know are inevitably forged and where history is made.

Chapter six, ‘Beginnings’, links four elements of normative and genealogical knowing, and at the same time suggests elements of sociogenesis as a way of coming to know otherwise. The first of these four elements is concerned with what Tim Ingold calls ‘occupant knowledge’ (the knowledge of imperial powers); its cocooning space offers ‘inhabitant knowledge’ (coming to know generated from the inside of the social world) (Ingold 2007: 81-89). The second element represents the old and recently recuperated concern (if not obsession) with ‘origins’; its cocoon offers ‘beginnings’ as a way of coming to know otherwise. The third represents customary ways of knowing that are presented to us as ‘new truths’; its cocoon offers journeys towards ‘the possible’. The fourth element represents ‘genealogical sequences’; its cocoon generates ‘sociogenic wayfaring’ as a way of coming to know otherwise.

The four normative ways of knowing presented in this chapter are integral to processes of racialisation. If, in the words of Michael J. Monahan (2011: 114), ‘we not only approach the world from somewhere but also toward somewhere’, then each of the four ways of coming to know that emerge in the cocoons of this chapter inspires a located orientation towards a world in which processes of racialisation are deprived of their ‘lethal cling’ (Morrison 1997: 5). ‘Inhabitant knowledge’, ‘beginnings’, ‘the possible’ and ‘sociogenic wayfaring’ depend upon eros: a register of love as a force for social change; a register of love as a political praxis. The Moroccan scholars and activists Abdelkebir Khatibi and Ghita El Khayat call this register of love aimance (El Khayat and Khatibi 2010). Aimance enables humaning as a political praxis imbued with will and with emotion. Humaning is a historically located and an open process of social interdependence. Humaning is arabesque in its praxis.

I end this book on a note which is intended to open up to radical change, to difficult conversations and to a possible future without ‘the look’, without race classification and without genetic ancestry tests as practices of racialisation. This note is an invitation to new beginnings for thought and for practice.