Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto is out!
My long-awaited book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, begun in 2015, is finally out!
The book is published by Africa World Press (AWP) and has 782 pages.
To order your copy, please follow this link: https://africaworldpressbooks.com/apartheid-studies
The Manifesto is targeted at researchers, scholars, students, policymakers, and general readers who have a cross-disciplinary interest in how oppression, injustice, inequality, poverty, and harm persist, and what can be done about it.
The Manifesto, which I had been writing since 2015, comes in four volumes. The publication that I am announcing here is only the first volume. (Volume II will be published in 2023, and Volume III and IV in 2024).
The Manifesto is something of a world first. In it, I propose the establishment of an interdisciplinary new field of study from the global south known as Apartheid Studies (AS). If there is, say, Holocaust Studies, why isn’t there Apartheid Studies? The absence does not make sense. This book, essentially, is the founding document and constitutive invitation to the formal study of apartheid.
A core research question in the Manifesto is: How does oppression persist? I find the answer in the exposition, construct, theoretical framework, and paradigm of apartheid. Despite Nelson Mandela saying “Never, never, and never again” to apartheid in 1994, apartheid has not gone away. Rather, it has simply become undetectable. It has melted into diurnal rhythms and household expenditure.
Prior to the Manifesto, there were no texts that grappled with apartheid as a paradigm, methodology, and theoretical framing. Well, that founding text is here now!
In Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, I develop what I believe is the first general theory of apartheid – an original, comprehensive, and authoritative theory and methodology of how oppression, harm, injustice, poverty, loss, and inequality persist. The prevalence and virulence of apartheid stays the same. What changes is its detectability. This is the whole thesis of Apartheid Studies. It is a prevalence-virulence-detection question. AS, as a field, turns on the study and resolution of these three problems.
I demonstrate that apartheid is the highest stage of oppression and that it functions by allocating differential rates of oppression to human beings – such that no two people in the world can experience oppression the same way or at the same rate. These differences constitute what I call the Rate of Oppression (ROp), the careful analysis of which is fundamental in understanding i) the persistence of oppression and, ii) how to undo apartheid. By the Manifesto’s end I have outlined what I hope is a fully-fledged, complete theoretical framework composed of more than one hundred and thirty tenets and constructs that invite new ways of thinking clearly about our modern times.
Apartheid Studies has been long overdue, and I am convinced that, as a field and as a practice, it will fundamentally alter our understanding of why things are the way they are in the world, and what to do about it.
Please grab a copy! And please spread the word!