Maurits van Bever Donker

Associate Professor
Research Manager

Maurits van Bever Donker’s research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world. Of particular interest is how the philosophy of Black Consciousness constitutes a notion of the subject through the aesthetic, what we might call a retraining of the senses. He also researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. His monograph, Texturing Difference, is available through Polity Press in the series Critical South, with a Preface by Belgian/Congolese philosopher Yala Kisukidi, and is located at the intersection of postcolonial and critical theory, literature and philosophy. In it, he situates the nuanced intervention of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa within the international conjuncture of anti-colonial thought and decolonisation. He makes the argument that the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its urgent political focus, should also be read as a philosophical intervention on the problem of Man that haunts the idea of race.

He convenes a research platform in the CHR on New Ecologies of the Subject, and is the Principal Investigator for an NIHSS Postdoctoral Project (funding 10 Postdoctoral fellows for two years) titled “A Practice of Postapartheid Freedom”. This project seeks to promote new research in the areas of “aesthetic education and democratic futures”, “aesthetics and humanism”, and “a new synthesis between the human and technology”. He is also a lead researcher on “Communicating the Humanities” together with Prof Premesh Lalu, and convenes the lecture and discussion series “Humanities in Session”, while providing strategic research leadership, planning, and oversight for securing and implementing research grants. Maurits is also one of the editors in chief for the international peer-reviewed African studies journal, Afrika Focus, and was recently appointed as co-Chair of the Critical Humanities Spaces Network of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) together with Katherine Wallerstein, which aims to provide a platform for critical reflection on the work of institutes and centres and the unique roles they play, and have the potential to play, both within and outside the academy.

PUBLICATIONS

Books, Edited Collections, Special Issues of Journals

• van Bever Donker, M. Texturing Difference: ‘Black Consciousness Philosophy’ and the ‘Script of Man’, Critical South. Polity Press, November 2024
• van Bever Donker, M and Truscott, R., (Eds) Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. Special Issue: Apartheid and the Unconscious, 2023
• van Bever Donker, M and Scott, L., (Eds) Afrika Focus. Special Issue: Transformative Constitutionalism: What Human? Vol. 36 (2023)
• van Bever Donker, M., Truscott, R., Minkley, G., and Lalu, P. (Eds) The Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid, Wits University Press, 2017
• van Bever Donker, M and Truscott, R., (Eds) Kronos: Journal of South African Histories. Special Issue: What is the University in Africa for? 2017

Book Chapters 

• van Bever Donker, M. (2022) “Producing Concepts for the Possibility of Freedom”. In: Gomes, C and Abreu, C (Eds), Public Humanities: Thinking Freedom in the African University. CODESRIA
• Currently being translated into Portuguese for republication by CODESRIA in 2022
• van Bever Donker, M., Truscott, R., Minkley, G., and Lalu, P. (2017) “Traversing the Social”, In: van Bever Donker, M., Truscott, R., Minkley, G., and Lalu, P. (Eds) The Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid, Wits University Press
• van Bever Donker, M. (2017) “The Principle of Insufficiency”, In: van Bever Donker, M., Truscott, R., Minkley, G., and Lalu, P. (Eds) The Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid, Wits University Press
• van Bever Donker, M. (2012) “Ethical Injunctions”, In: Premesh Lalu and Noeleen Murray Eds. Becoming UWC: Reflections, pathways, and unmaking apartheid’s legacy. Cape Town, Centre for Humanities Research
• van Bever Donker, M., Rassool, C. (2007) “South African Apartheid: The White Man Must Govern” In: Apartheid: the South African Mirror, ACTAR: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

 Articles in Peer-reviewed and Accredited Journals

• van Bever Donker, M. (2023) “Interrupting, the Human: Imagining Freedom” in van Bever Donker, M and Scott, L., (Eds) Afrika Focus. Special Issue: Transformative Constitutionalism: What Human? Vol. 36 (2023), 41 – 57.
• Van Bever Donker, M & Scott, L (2023) “Transformative Constitutionalism: What Human is Imagined in the “Human Rights” contained in the South African Constitution” in van Bever Donker, M and Scott, L., (Eds) Afrika Focus. Special Issue: Transformative Constitutionalism: What Human? Vol. 36 (2023), 1 – 10.
• van Bever Donker, M & Truscott, R (2023) “Apartheid and the Unconscious: An Introduction” in van Bever Donker, M and Truscott, R., (Eds) Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. Special Issue: Apartheid and the Unconscious
• van Bever Donker, M. (2022) “Between Problem and Critique: Wither the Postcolonial?” in Minkley G & Pohlandt-McCormick, H (Eds), Kronos: Journal of South African Histories. Special Issue on “The Other Cape”
• van Bever Donker, M. (2021) ‘Black South African autobiography after Deleuze: Belonging and becoming in self-testimony’, [review] Journal of Postcolonial Writing
• van Bever Donker, M & Truscott, R. (2017) “What is the University in Africa for” in Truscott, R & Van Bever-Donker, M (Eds), Kronos: Journal of South African Histories. Special Issue on ‘What is the University in Africa for?’
• van Bever Donker, M. (2016) ‘The “Rough Edge of Deterritorialisation”: Contemplation’, Parallax, 22:2, 235 – 247
• van Bever Donker, M. (2012) ‘Ethical injunctions: the University of the Western Cape in the face of the “here and now”’, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African studies, 38:1, 55 – 67
• van Bever Donker, M. (2012) ‘Welcome to Our Hillbrow: Learning to “learn to live” in the wake of apartheid’ Dissidences, 4: 8, Article 12.