Knowing from loss

In South Africa, student calls for free quality decolonized education have been coincident with demands for the transformation of the canons, curricula and pedagogies of their disciplines. At the height of the protests assembled around #feesmustfall since 2014, some students at the University of the Witwatersrand formed their own reading groups, attempting to develop their own curricula, but also presenting their departments with memorandums demanding that these disciplines decolonize the universals they base their assumptions upon to better reflect their experiences and contexts. These confrontations were located around at least three conceptual terrains: decoloniality, intersectionality and afropessimism. In this article, I am specifically interested in how an investment in these three conceptual terrains is located in what Fred Moten describes as the paraontological relationship between blacks and blackness. That is, that across those terrains the conditions by which ‘experience’ as a representation of experience (produced, reproduced and retold by those with the capacity to know or to represent knowledge) in epistemological processes is articulated through forms of abstraction and universalism that make/made blackness a particular site of intensity for engagement. The temporal breaks implied in my use of past/present speaks to the moment/s of heightened protests, but also an ongoinginess of epistemic struggle at universities. I speak from my location as a scholar and teacher in a ‘non-discipline’, which possesses its own canonical baggage.