Steve Biko Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness [Paperback]

Sithole's?critical decolonial foray into the?liberatory ideas of Steve Biko is pioneering?and refreshing in many ways.?Biko is neither reduced to a simple shrine to be worshiped nor a hagiography to be celebrated. Through Sithole's sharp analysis, Biko is rightfully given a place in the burgeoning?pantheon of black liberatory philosophies.This book is a profound ground-breaking account of Bikos philosophy from a decolonial epistemic perspective hitherto unheard of. It is testimony to the relevance and ever growing re-emergence of Biko and the Black Consciousness philosophy in a country still suffering from antiblack racism, Nelson Mandelas efforts at racial reconciliation notwithstanding. Sitholes book is therefore a must-read for anyone trying to understand the confluence of existentialism and decolonial theory in Bikos philosophy of Black subjectivity in an antiblack society.Moving away from the domain of idolization and veneration, Sithole situates Steve Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. Through an exploration of Biko's meditations, Sithole introduces Biko to readers as a decolonial philosopher, someone more than just a biographical subject.Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Biko's meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditationlÃ-