Critical Humanism and Academic Activism in Fatima Meer: Choosing to Be Defiant by Rajendra Chetty (2022)

Abstract

This article will attempt to understand Fatima Meer’s scholarship and activism from a critical humanism perspective through an analysis of the visual biography Fatima Meer: Choosing to Be Defiant (2022). Meer aligned her intellectual programme with the subaltern struggle against inhumanity, and she valued knowledge production and theorisation in subaltern spaces. Humanism is an activity devoted to detecting and denouncing tendencies of inhumanity and it is linked to critical theory’s aim of revealing and explaining inequalities and hypocrisy in society. It is within the current context of conformity and silence among the scholarly orthodoxy in higher education that I reflect on Meer’s critical humanism within the intellectual programme. Meer revealed and explained inequality in society by using the techniques of immanent critique and dialectical thought, where the researcher exposes contradictions between claims and reality. This article foregrounds two aspects of Meer’s life narrative: her role as an academic activist, underpinned by the theory of critical humanism, and her prison diary, published as Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days 1976 (Kwela Books, 2001). The latter is analysed with relation to the theme of black women writing the self.