Theoria

This article employs a critical Black Atlantic frame to re-examine, re-evaluate and reinterpret the historical memory of the Black Peril in South Africa. It exposes the Black Peril as a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised Black men as potential rapists of white women. This racist narrative was vehemently expressed in early twentieth-century South Africa. A key finding of this work is that the Black Peril was a highly successful racist campaign because it not only led to the criminalisation of interracial sex between Black men and white women but was also used to justify racist laws that had far-reaching effects on social relations in the broader society – eventually yielding a white supremacist state (apartheid) – which proceeded to use the Black Peril discourse to mobilise an aggressive racialisation process for both whites and Blacks.

I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing ‘passive legitimacy’, which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation.

In Good Jew, Bad Jew Steven Friedman argues that the meaning of anti-Semitism favoured by the Israeli government and its allies prioritises loyalty to the Israeli state over identification with the Jewish people. On this view, ‘good Jews’ are those who support the Israeli state, and ‘bad Jews’ are those who criticise Zionism. This framing reflects a discursive transition over decades linked to the desire to make Israel part of Europe politically and culturally. Not only has the Zionist version of anti-Semitism inverted traditional notions of Jewishness but it has transformed ‘Jewishness’ from the ‘other’ to whiteness, to an ally of white supremacists. This racial embrace goes hand in glove with the brutal practice of colonial violence evident in Gaza. Friedman makes his case drawing on the work African scholars such as Biko, Fanon and Mamdani, Southern scholars such as Ashis Nandy, as well as established scholars of the North.

In this interview, the previous editor-in-chief of Theoria, Lawrence Hamilton, describes the evolution of Theoria to become a journal with more Southern political theory scholars and ideas, and how this was inspired by the limitations of Northern theory alone in understanding real world political problems in South Africa especially. He traces the evolution of this thought in becoming a more ‘decolonial’ type thinker through his own work, and how this intersected with Theoria's focus, with specific reference to special issues of the journal including ‘Freedom and Power’ in 2013, ‘Empire and Economics’ in 2016 and a series of African-focussed editions in 2018, 2019 and 2021. At the heart of this lived experienced of intellectual development is a validation of the importance of context-based theory and theorising that is nevertheless still engaged with northern thought and global issues. This intellectual history helps clarify Theoria's current substantive focus.

Motsamai Molefe and Christopher Allsobrook (eds), Human Dignity in an African Context. Springer, 2023, x + 307 pp. ISBN: 978-3-03-137340-4 (hbk)

Uchenna Okeja (ed.), Routledge Handbook of African Political Philosophy. Routledge, 2023, 436 pp. ISBN: 978-1-00-314352-9 (hbk)