Race Otherwise. Zimitri Erasmus

worlds and new ways of seeing. It emerges from the very necessity for a ‘pluritopic hermeneutics ... [since no] one side of the epistemological divide [will do]’ (Mignolo 2012: 17). Significantly, the implication of such a hermeneutics is that there are no original origins – be these epistemic, cultural, political or biological – to revive or to which to return.

      There is no past waiting intact to be retrieved for preservation; no immaculate past waiting for our return; no past waiting for blame. There is only our interrogation of what we have come to know about history, and what we can make of and with this coming to know in our attempts to human the future. This freedom from hegemonic demands for the declaration of origins and from hegemonic impositions of origins loosens the hold of both Eurocentric developmentalist logics, on the one hand, and of ‘the trial’ embedded in nativist logics, so prevalent in contemporary South Africa, on the other. Thought, becoming, humaning and relation are freed to think, to become, to human and to relate not just differently but in an other way – otherwisely. This freedom enables possibilities – foreclosed by both Eurocentrism and nativism – for imagining something other than a logic of domination, and something other than a logic of victimisation: a logic of relation.

      For me, thinking from multiple thresholds means engaging with racialised difference and its politics as a catalyst for – not a hindrance to – what Ingold (2015) calls humaning. For Arturo Escobar, a scholar of decolonial thought, this means ‘thinking from difference and towards the constitution of alternative local and regional worlds’ (2013: 37-38, my emphasis) without losing either locatedness or enmeshment. This perspective means thinking and living alongside the categories of Europe, America and colonialism and, by implication, defying the desire to deploy these very categories in reaction to Europe, America and colonialism. It implies defying the reductionism, the violence and the reliance on a foundational Otherness of both Eurocentrism and nativism as modes of knowing and being. It implies ‘not just ... changing the contents but the very terms of the conversation’ (Escobar 2013: 41), in so doing shifting the terrain for argumentation. These are among the countless beginnings on my journey to the personal, political and intellectual place articulated in this work.