Articulating difference: reading Biko-with-Hall

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article centres a selected set of “race-class debates” from the 1970s that were characterized by a powerful reformulation of political critiques of the South African racial order, both from within Marxist thought and with the dramatic entry of Black Consciousness onto the political stage. Our discussion focuses on two exemplary interventions: Biko’s testimony at the SASO/BPC trial and his presentation of the theoretical basis of BC’s political strategy, and Stuart Hall’s 1980 essay “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance”, and its reformulation of a Marxist perspective for thinking through race-class relations. With Hall we (re)discover theoretical terms for thinking through the problem of how relatively autonomous practices of domination come to be articulated. With Biko, we discover a strategic modality for approaching the political problem of collective subjectivity that holds lessons for how struggles against frameworks of domination might be politically articulated in their multiplicity.