Keleketla! Library, in partnership with the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) is proud to present, Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities.
Inspired by the provocations of the 2019 Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) colloquium Call for Proposals, the papers that form part of this collection directly confront questions of black memory, thought, imagination, and praxis under conditions of extreme racialised and gendered violence. Each of the essays thinks deeply and seriously about the historical and epistemological foundations of our inherited conceptual frames and the subsequent impact for the ways we invoke these frames in narratives of resistance, hope and freedom. From their different disciplinary and sociopolitical locations, the authors in this collection take seriously sites beyond the academy – the art gallery, stage, music video, the bedroom, the township, and the dance floor, to name a few – as key sites of knowledge production that have and continue to inform emerging narratives around black futures. The collection traverses thematic spaces such as desire and consent, consumption and freedom, black performative possibility, post-apartheid black subjectivity and black memory. The aim of the collection is to create a pedagogical device that foregrounds the sonic, aesthetic, epistemic and performative strategies of creating emancipatory thinking, feeling, imagining and being, that will contribute to critically expanding the decolonial black archive.
Edited by: Moshibudi Motimele and Rangoato Hlasane with contributions by: Mawethu Nkosana; Moshibudi Motimele; Ayabulela Mhlahlo; Nomancotsho Pakade; Gorata Chengeta; Tumi Mogorosi; Same Mdluli; Rangoato Hlasane and Zukolwenkosi Zikalala.
This edition was made possible with the generous intellectual, editorial and financial support of the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST). We give thanks to additional support by #AfricaNoFilter, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. We acknowledge the grant from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Faculty of Humanities Graduate Studies Committee.
The editors thank Professor Jill Bradbury for gracefully and diligently taking over editorial advisory and institutional mediation after the passing of our beloved Prof. Peterson.
The editors would like to also thank the peer reviewers who provided generous feedback that strengthened each and every contribution in this publication.
In fond memory of Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson – for his timeless and priceless mentorship and fellowship.
* Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities is available at Lit.Culture, 21 Albrecht Street (Corner Commissioner Street), Museum of African Design (MOAD), Maboneng. R300
