African Hermeneutics' ‘outing’ of whiteness

Abstract

This paper argues that the critique offered by African hermeneutics of what they perceive to be Western hermeneutics, can be interpreted as an interpellation of whiteness. The paper endeavours to explore aspects of this interpellation. Based on Pres. Thabo Mbeki’s letter on the eve of Human Rights Day, it proceeds by illuminating several other interpellations, starting with Butler’s gender interpellation in order to provide some structural resonance between gender performativity and racial performativity. It then looks at two racial performativities, namely the videotape of the Rodney King beating and Fanon’s vignette ‘Look, a Negro!’ in terms of an assertion of blackness as the very antithesis of the social order. Two reactions to blackness as antithesis of the social order are then looked at, namely the 50 year old Des prêtres noirs s’interrogent and Kä Mana’s view on the myth of the West. The paper offers Perkinson’s White theology as a possible, yet problematic, answer to the interpellation of African Hermeneutics found in these two reactions. The paper is concluded with a few observations about whiteness.