My long-awaited book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, is out!

The book is published by Africa World Press (AWP) and has 754 pages.

To order your copy, please click on this link: https://africaworldpressbooks.com/apartheid-studies/

The Manifesto is targeted at researchers, scholars, students, policymakers, and general readers who have a cross-disciplinary interest in how oppression, injustice, inequality, poverty, and harm persist, and what can be done about it.

The book is something of a world first. In it, I propose the establishment of an interdisciplinary new field of study from the global south known as Apartheid Studies (AS). If there is, say, Holocaust Studies, why isn’t there Apartheid Studies? The absence does not make sense. This book, essentially, is the founding document and constitutive invitation to the formal study of apartheid.

A core research question in AS is: How does oppression persist? I find the answer in the exposition, construct, theoretical framework, and paradigm of apartheid. Despite Nelson Mandela saying “Never, never, and never again” to apartheid in 1994, apartheid has not gone away. Rather, it has simply become undetectable. It has melted into diurnal rhythms and household expenditure.

Prior to the Manifesto, there were no texts that grappled with apartheid as a paradigm, methodology, and theoretical framing. That founding text is here now!

In Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto I develop what I believe is the first general theory of apartheid – an original, comprehensive and authoritative theory and methodology of how oppression, harm, injustice, poverty, loss, and inequality persist. The prevalence and virulence of apartheid stays the same. What changes is its detectability. This is the whole thesis of AS. It is a prevalence-virulence-detection question. AS, as a field, turns on the study and resolution of these 3 problems.

I demonstrate that apartheid is the highest stage of oppression and that it functions by allocating differential rates of oppression to human beings – such that no two people in the world can experience oppression the same way or at the same rate. These differences constitute what I call the Rate of Oppression (ROp), the careful analysis of which is fundamental in understanding i) the persistence of oppression and, ii) how to undo apartheid. By the Manifesto’s end I have outlined what I hope is a fully-fledged, complete theoretical framework composed of more than 130 tenets and constructs that invite new ways of thinking clearly about our modern times.

Apartheid Studies has been long overdue and I am convinced that, as a field and as a practice, it will fundamentally alter our understanding of why things are the way they are in the world and what to do about it.

Please order your copy, spread the word, and share with your networks.