Richard Pithouse
Biographic Data
| ID | 89815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Pithouse |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Pithouse |
| SIGNATURE | PITHOUSE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0931-9881 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Our Mutual Freedoms: On Mabogo P. More’s Philosophy
The South African philosopher Mabogo More’s body of work has been produced in fidelity to the event of the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement among Black students in South Africa in the early 1970s. Among many other contributions his work affirms the often neglected importance of Paulo Freire in the politics of this period. The commitment to mutuality, to the recognition of the openness and freedom of every consciousness, that marks Fr…
Thinking from and through oppression
Building the Frantz Fanon School: An interview with Mqapheli Bonono
This short excerpt from a much longer interview with Mqapheli Bonono, the current deputy president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, discusses the building of the Frantz Fanon School in Durban and the movement’s evolving approach to political education. Bonono reflects on how lessons drawn from Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) informed Abahlali baseMjondolo’s efforts to organise political education work amid the pressures of an…
Mabogo Percy More: Recollections from the University of Durban-Westville period
We Are Still Not Counted As Human: Contesting Unfreedom from Below in South Africa
This interview with S'bu Zikode, cofounder and current leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest popular movement to have emerged in South Africa after apartheid, was conducted a month before the 30th anniversary of the formal end of apartheid. Zikode gives an account of the arc of his life, and that of the movement, illuminating the costs of progressive political commitment in Durban, a city where political violence is routine. Zikode also ex…
The Deep Futures of Subaltern Studies: Three reviews of Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being Against the Capitalocene
Hit the Tire
The meaning of the strike has evolved across space and time. In contemporary South Africa it has come to include the road blockade, which is now a ubiquitous tool of popular politics in general and forms of politics organized from shack settlements in particular. This essay, drawing on many years of participation in popular politics in the city of Durban, shows that the road blockade is often, although not always, articulated to a politics presen…
J acob D lamini . The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police
The Terrorist Album, Jacob Dlamini’s third book, is a significant work presented in elegant prose and grounded in impressive empirical detail and lightly worn theoretical dexterity. It follows his first two books, Native Nostalgia (2009) and Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014), in offering forms of nuance that complicate Manichean forms of memory. Toward the end of 1993, shortly before white rule ca…
Being Human After 1492
Forging New Political Identities in the Shanty Towns of Durban, South Africa
This contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a popular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa. It seeks to examine, via more than a decade of immersion and research, one instance of how popular organisation and mobilisation have been mediated through shifting political identities. It argues that if discourse professionals on the left are to become effective actors it will be necessar…
Leslie Anne Hadfield. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa
As the political credibility of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa continues its rapid decline under President Jacob Zuma, there has been considerable interest, particularly among young people, in other currents in the anti-apartheid struggle. This has included the Pan-Africanism most famously associated with Robert Sobukwe. But it is the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s, and Steve Biko, its best-known figure, tha…
Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone
In 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute …
Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination , edited by Ann Laura Stoler
Imperial Debris: On and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xi, 365 pp. $25.95 US (paper). This is a book of weight and consequence. Rot Remains, the title of Ann Laura Stoler's introduction this volume, takes its title from Derek Walcott's poem Ruins of a Great House. At the centre of the epigraph Stoler takes from the poem is the line rot remains with us, the men are gone. Stoler has curated as much as ed…
The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa
In South Africa, the shack settlement has become a site of acute political intensity in recent years. However, political action organized from the shack settlement is frequently presented as being outside of the domain of the political-as a spasmodic response to deprivation, as criminal or consequent to external conspiracy. This paper argues that liberal, as well as some currents of Marxist and nationalist thought, have demonstrated an inability,…
Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013
Other| May 01 2014 Nelson Mandela, 1918–2013: The Crossing Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2014) 2014 (119): 247–249. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2644312 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citatio…
NGOs and urban movements: Notes from South Africa
This article notes that in South Africa the relationship between grassroots organisations and NGOs has often been fractious – to the point that there have been a number of rebellions against NGOs on the part of grassroots organisations. It also notes that NGOs have sometimes reacted in a plainly authoritarian manner to grassroots critiques. And, more positively, it also notes that some NGOs have developed positive and valued relationships with gr…
The Open Door of Every Consciousness
This essay begins by noting the commitment to the universal that animated Frantz Fanon's praxis. It then suggests that in a moment of renewal in both radical thought and practice there could be real value in returning to this commitment. However, the essay warns that in the past the North Atlantic Left has often been too quick to assume the universalism of its own thought. It suggests that contemporary attempts to return to a universal emancipato…
Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of 'the local
Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the…
Thought Amidst Waste
This paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaire's terms, 'to the measure of the world', a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect of political agency,…
Fidelity to Fanon
I n the logbook that he kept while doing reconnaissance work in Mali in 1960, Fanon recounted his arrival at the airport in Accra without, as expected, his comrade, the Cameroonian militant Félix Moumié. Moumié had failed to keep an appointment in Rome before traveling on to Accra. “His father,” Fanon wrote, “standing at the arrival in Accra saw me coming, alone, and a great sadness settled on his face” (1967b:180). Two days later they discovered…
Frantz Fanon 50 years later: A ‘Thinking Africa’ conference
The Thinking Africa Project in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Rhodes University hosted its inaugural annual conference in July 2011. It was decided to dedicate the conferen
A Politics of the Poor: Shack Dwellers' Struggles in Durban
This article, written in response to recent arguments about whether or not shack dwellers can exercise historical agency, outlines the history of shack dwellers' struggles in the South African city of Durban. The sections looking at struggles under colonialism and apartheid and the nature of the post-apartheid deal with regard to housing draw on the extensive literature on these questions. The final section, which gives an outline of the emergenc…
Struggle Is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as "a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates." It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as "indecent" and announced thatNelson Mandela will be hosting a People's Forum on Saturday morning in Inanda to hear the views of residents in informal settlements…
Coffin for the Councillor: A Report on the Emergence of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
Producing The Poor: The World Ban's New Discourse of Domination
This essay seeks to investigate the World Banks representation of the poor via a close reading of The Banks Voices of the Poor and a critical comparison between this book and Ashwin Desais We Are the Poors. The essay argues that The Banks book is an attempt to represent the majority of humanity as The Poor and that this othering produces The Poor as a category of people who are politically inert largely responsible for their own circumstances and…
A Politics of the Poor: Shack Dwellers' Struggles in Durban
This article, written in response to recent arguments about whether or not shack dwellers can exercise historical agency, outlines the history of shack dwellers' struggles in the South African city of Durban. The sections looking at struggles under colonialism and apartheid and the nature of the post-apartheid deal with regard to housing draw on the extensive literature on these questions. The final section, which gives an outline of the emergenc…
But We Were Thousands: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State's turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequ…
That the tool never possess the man: Taking Fanon's humanism seriously
The key argument in this article is that there are three good reasons to take Fanon's humanism seriously. The first is that he took it seriously; the second is that he wrote to wrest humanism from the distortions of racism and colonialism; and the third is that Fanon's humanism is a current in the movement that Michael Hart and Antonio Negri call revolutionary humanism, which they distinguish from reactionary humanism. The second and more subterr…
Struggle Is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as "a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates." It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as "indecent" and announced thatNelson Mandela will be hosting a People's Forum on Saturday morning in Inanda to hear the views of residents in informal settlements…
Coffin for the Councillor: A Report on the Emergence of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of 'the local
Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the…
The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa
In South Africa, the shack settlement has become a site of acute political intensity in recent years. However, political action organized from the shack settlement is frequently presented as being outside of the domain of the political-as a spasmodic response to deprivation, as criminal or consequent to external conspiracy. This paper argues that liberal, as well as some currents of Marxist and nationalist thought, have demonstrated an inability,…
Thought Amidst Waste
This paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaire's terms, 'to the measure of the world', a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect of political agency,…
Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone
In 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute …
NGOs and urban movements: Notes from South Africa
This article notes that in South Africa the relationship between grassroots organisations and NGOs has often been fractious – to the point that there have been a number of rebellions against NGOs on the part of grassroots organisations. It also notes that NGOs have sometimes reacted in a plainly authoritarian manner to grassroots critiques. And, more positively, it also notes that some NGOs have developed positive and valued relationships with gr…
Independent Intavenshan: Frantz Fanon and the Dialectic of Solidarity
Forging New Political Identities in the Shanty Towns of Durban, South Africa
This contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a popular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa. It seeks to examine, via more than a decade of immersion and research, one instance of how popular organisation and mobilisation have been mediated through shifting political identities. It argues that if discourse professionals on the left are to become effective actors it will be necessar…
The Open Door of Every Consciousness
This essay begins by noting the commitment to the universal that animated Frantz Fanon's praxis. It then suggests that in a moment of renewal in both radical thought and practice there could be real value in returning to this commitment. However, the essay warns that in the past the North Atlantic Left has often been too quick to assume the universalism of its own thought. It suggests that contemporary attempts to return to a universal emancipato…
What stank in the past is the present's perfume: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park
Research Article| October 01 2004 “What stank in the past is the present's perfume”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park Ashwin Desai; Ashwin Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (4): 841–875. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-4-841 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Fac…
Report from the frontlines of an ‘undeclared war
2003). Report from the frontlines of an ‘undeclared war’. Politikon: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 65-73
Independent Intavenshan: Frantz Fanon and the Dialectic of Solidarity
Report from the frontlines of an ‘undeclared war
2003). Report from the frontlines of an ‘undeclared war’. Politikon: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 65-73
That the tool never possess the man: Taking Fanon's humanism seriously
The key argument in this article is that there are three good reasons to take Fanon's humanism seriously. The first is that he took it seriously; the second is that he wrote to wrest humanism from the distortions of racism and colonialism; and the third is that Fanon's humanism is a current in the movement that Michael Hart and Antonio Negri call revolutionary humanism, which they distinguish from reactionary humanism. The second and more subterr…
Report from the frontlines of an 'undeclared war
Producing The Poor: The World Ban's New Discourse of Domination
This essay seeks to investigate the World Banks representation of the poor via a close reading of The Banks Voices of the Poor and a critical comparison between this book and Ashwin Desais We Are the Poors. The essay argues that The Banks book is an attempt to represent the majority of humanity as The Poor and that this othering produces The Poor as a category of people who are politically inert largely responsible for their own circumstances and…
Sanction All Revolts: A Reply to Rebecca Pointer
This article is a reply to Rebecca Pointer’s response to our paper, ‘“But We Were Thousands”: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park’. It begins by making some remarks on the terrain in which academic interventions in elite publics are made in contemporary South Africa. In particular, it notes the general tacit support for a highly repressive response (discursive and material) to subaltern dissent. The article then…
What stank in the past is the present's perfume: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park
Research Article| October 01 2004 “What stank in the past is the present's perfume”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park Ashwin Desai; Ashwin Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (4): 841–875. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-4-841 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Fac…
But We Were Thousands: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State's turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequ…
Struggle Is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
On November 9, 1993, the African National Congress (ANC) issued a press statement condemning the housing crisis in South Africa as "a matter which falls squarely at the door of the National Party regime and its surrogates." It went on to describe conditions in the informal settlements as "indecent" and announced thatNelson Mandela will be hosting a People's Forum on Saturday morning in Inanda to hear the views of residents in informal settlements…
Coffin for the Councillor: A Report on the Emergence of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa
A Politics of the Poor: Shack Dwellers' Struggles in Durban
This article, written in response to recent arguments about whether or not shack dwellers can exercise historical agency, outlines the history of shack dwellers' struggles in the South African city of Durban. The sections looking at struggles under colonialism and apartheid and the nature of the post-apartheid deal with regard to housing draw on the extensive literature on these questions. The final section, which gives an outline of the emergenc…
Fidelity to Fanon
I n the logbook that he kept while doing reconnaissance work in Mali in 1960, Fanon recounted his arrival at the airport in Accra without, as expected, his comrade, the Cameroonian militant Félix Moumié. Moumié had failed to keep an appointment in Rome before traveling on to Accra. “His father,” Fanon wrote, “standing at the arrival in Accra saw me coming, alone, and a great sadness settled on his face” (1967b:180). Two days later they discovered…
Frantz Fanon 50 years later: A ‘Thinking Africa’ conference
The Thinking Africa Project in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Rhodes University hosted its inaugural annual conference in July 2011. It was decided to dedicate the conferen
Thought Amidst Waste
This paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaire's terms, 'to the measure of the world', a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect of political agency,…
NGOs and urban movements: Notes from South Africa
This article notes that in South Africa the relationship between grassroots organisations and NGOs has often been fractious – to the point that there have been a number of rebellions against NGOs on the part of grassroots organisations. It also notes that NGOs have sometimes reacted in a plainly authoritarian manner to grassroots critiques. And, more positively, it also notes that some NGOs have developed positive and valued relationships with gr…
The Open Door of Every Consciousness
This essay begins by noting the commitment to the universal that animated Frantz Fanon's praxis. It then suggests that in a moment of renewal in both radical thought and practice there could be real value in returning to this commitment. However, the essay warns that in the past the North Atlantic Left has often been too quick to assume the universalism of its own thought. It suggests that contemporary attempts to return to a universal emancipato…
Conjunctural remarks on the political significance of 'the local
Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the…
Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination , edited by Ann Laura Stoler
Imperial Debris: On and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xi, 365 pp. $25.95 US (paper). This is a book of weight and consequence. Rot Remains, the title of Ann Laura Stoler's introduction this volume, takes its title from Derek Walcott's poem Ruins of a Great House. At the centre of the epigraph Stoler takes from the poem is the line rot remains with us, the men are gone. Stoler has curated as much as ed…
The Shack Settlement as a Site of Politics: Reflections from South Africa
In South Africa, the shack settlement has become a site of acute political intensity in recent years. However, political action organized from the shack settlement is frequently presented as being outside of the domain of the political-as a spasmodic response to deprivation, as criminal or consequent to external conspiracy. This paper argues that liberal, as well as some currents of Marxist and nationalist thought, have demonstrated an inability,…
Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013
Other| May 01 2014 Nelson Mandela, 1918–2013: The Crossing Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2014) 2014 (119): 247–249. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2644312 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citatio…
Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone
In 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute …
Leslie Anne Hadfield. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa
As the political credibility of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa continues its rapid decline under President Jacob Zuma, there has been considerable interest, particularly among young people, in other currents in the anti-apartheid struggle. This has included the Pan-Africanism most famously associated with Robert Sobukwe. But it is the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s, and Steve Biko, its best-known figure, tha…
Forging New Political Identities in the Shanty Towns of Durban, South Africa
This contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a popular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa. It seeks to examine, via more than a decade of immersion and research, one instance of how popular organisation and mobilisation have been mediated through shifting political identities. It argues that if discourse professionals on the left are to become effective actors it will be necessar…
Being Human After 1492
J acob D lamini . The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police
The Terrorist Album, Jacob Dlamini’s third book, is a significant work presented in elegant prose and grounded in impressive empirical detail and lightly worn theoretical dexterity. It follows his first two books, Native Nostalgia (2009) and Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014), in offering forms of nuance that complicate Manichean forms of memory. Toward the end of 1993, shortly before white rule ca…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (19 works) · South African History and Culture (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · History (8 works) · African cultural and philosophical studies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)