Twenty years after the end of apartheid rule, the claim that democratic South Africa is founded on the 'spirit of law' (nomos) of our shared humanity is questionable, to say the least. Some would argue that all talk of Ubuntu (or African humanism) should be dismissed as a passing fad of an exhausted nationalism. But, a different response to the present is possible; one that proceeds from a temporary suspension (epoche) of the nationalist matrix, and all the dead-end questions that have resulted from it, in order to reposition Ubuntu in the more cosmopolitan terms of a critical humanism that must always remain irreducible to the politics of the day. As discussed in this book, this is a project that has to return to, in order to retrace, the founding claim that a politics premised on our shared humanity is, after all, perhaps possible.

Imitation happened when an unsuspecting philosopher one day found himself equally outraged by South African president Jacob Zuma's Big Man building project in Nkandla; awed, all over again, by Milan Kundera's Immortality; and numbed by the monument to hubris generally known as `the highest basilica in all of Christendom', Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire.

This collection of essays contextualises the discourse on Ubuntu within the wider historical framework of postcolonial attempts to re-articulate African humanism as a substantial philosophy and emancipatory ideology. As such, the emergence of Ubuntu as a postcolonial philosophy is posited as both a function of and a critical response to Western modernity. The central question addressed in this book is: Was Ubuntu's emancipatory potential confined to and perhaps exhausted by South Africa's transition to democracy or does the notion of our 'shared humanity', as theorised in Ubuntu discourse, still have relevance for our urgent need to imagine South Africa's post-nationalist and post-neoliberal future? The contributions in this volume address this question from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines, including political philosophy, African history, gender studies, philosophy of law and cultural studies. Leonhard Praeg is associate professor and Siphokazi Magadla is a lecturer and PhD candidate, both in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Contributors: Danielle Bowler, Ama Biney, Ezra Chitando, Drucilla Cornell, Katherine Furman, Lewis R. Gordon, Ilze Keevy, Siphokazi Magadla, Leonhard Praeg, Mogobe B. Ramose, Issa Shivji

In 2015 and 2016 institutions of higher education across South Africa exploded in a series of protests/revolts, collectively referred to in this volume as #MustFall. An important sub-discourse articulated the student protests/revolt as an iteration of the founding of South Africa as democratic Republic. As such, the protests/revolt constituted a total onslaught on the politico-juridical and epistemological order, which is, in many ways, a continuation of old apartheid into democratic South Africa. This shudder reverberated through the very foundations of the new Republic and its institutions of higher learning and acted as a catalyst that once and for all propelled us beyond sentimental nationalist notions of `Africanising' this or that and talk of `transformation' carefully circumscribed by neo-liberal commitments to maintaining the status quo. The essays in this volume are direct or indirect responses to that shudder. They either directly address some aspect of #MustFall or discuss debates that pre-date the movement, but have gained renewed interest and urgency, in part, because of it. A shudder of the origin, being what it is, can never be addressed or even outlined in its totality. The objective of this collection of essays is therefore to simply walk along the fault line that has opened up as a result of that shudder in order to trace some of the contestations between Subject (philosophy) and subject that have emerged as a result of it; a fault line where the disciplinary nature of a Subject is being questioned and interrogated by subjects who will no longer be disciplined by it.

Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond is, in the best sense of the term, a homage to Valentin Mudimbe. This collection of essays honours the intellectual legacy of Mudimbe, for decades now one of Africa and the diaspora's most significant minds, by taking up the challenges - ethical, political, philosophical, literary, sociological, anthropological, psychological - his work poses. This book gathers a group of US- and Africa-based scholars, many of whom are long-time Mudimbe collaborators and colleagues, who use the questions posed, the critiques and insights offered and the paradigms constructed by Mudimbe's oeuvre to understand the implication - and, in some instances, the application - of Mudimbe's work in our moment. In this way, the project is true to Mudimbe's deepest commitment because the collection, for all the range of its contributions, for all the variegated and often dissonant - yet resonant - ways in which the authors take up Mudimbe's thinking, never strays too far from the historic question of violence and the effects of that violence in the Great Lakes region of Africa; and, indeed, of violence in Africa itself. This is, in every important way, the founding inquiry of Mudimbe's work, and it is sustained in this collection; and, as importantly, it is given new life, new philosophical shape, new political impetus, because it is a question that continues to haunt Mudimbe's writing and, of course, the continent itself. In so honouring Mudimbe, this book is grounded in a key contribution by Mudimbe himself. Mudimbe is thus, as has long been his wont, reflecting upon his work in the company of those scholars whose work he has influenced and whom, it is clear, have been important interlocutors for Mudimbe. Contributors: Justin K. Bisanswa, Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, Grant Farred, Olga Hel-Bongo, Kasereka Kavwahirehi, Laura Kerr, V-Y Mudimbe, Leonhard Praeg and Zubairu Wai.