Complexities of identity/difference: Black Consciousness ideology in South Africa

Abstract

The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa has been criticized by a number of academic and non‐academic commentators for failing to contribute substantially to the overall trajectory of political resistance in the post‐Sharpeville period, for constituting a reactionary ideology of cultural authenticity and racial particularity, and for simply repeating other forms of separatist ideology such as those of Black Power in the US, or Africanism in South Africa. My account challenges this dominant reading by drawing upon a theory of discourse, which has been articulated by writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Moujfe and Slavoj Zizek. In so doing, I examine three different discursive strategies by which the ideology of Black Consciousness was constituted and formed during the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s. These include: (i) the reversal of the White/Black hierarchy in apartheid South Africa; (ii) a complex mediation between the ideas and values of ‘universality’ and ‘particularity'; and (Hi) the Derridean logic of ‘ iterability’.