CAP: Postgraduate Seminar Series presents Siphosethu Baleni (online)

[Werner F. Smith]

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to attend the inaugural talk in our seminar series. Please save the date and time. We look forward to your participation.

 

Violence as an Anti-Black Structure of Relation: On Intra-Black Intersubjectivity

Siphosethu Baleni

Department of Politics and Philosophy,

University of Fort Hare, South Africa

 

Abstract:

I present an argument from my MA research that understands violence in post-apartheid South Africa as an enduring structure of relation shaping how Black subjects encounter themselves and one another. Drawing on critical phenomenology and the works of scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, Pumla Dineo Gqola, and Kopano Ratele, I begin my analysis from lived experience and the affective textures of Black everydayness to examine how violence becomes sedimented within perception, embodiment, movement, and relational life.

Mobilising the concepts of flesh, grammar, and atmosphere, the paper explores how anti-Black violence circulates within intra-Black structures of relationality, shaping the terms through which Black subjects come to perceive, inhabit both space and their bodies, and relate to one another. In doing so, the talk shifts the analysis of anti-Black violence beyond exclusively white/Black encounters to consider how the afterlives of apartheid continue to organise Black relational life itself. Ultimately, I argue that violence endures not simply as a historical inheritance, but as a living and mutating grammar of relating to the Black body, sedimented within the affective, bodily, psychic, and intersubjective terrains of post-apartheid existence, reproduced through the atmospheric and embodied conditions of everyday Black sociality in post-apartheid South Africa.

Short Bio:

Siphosethu Baleni recently completed her MA in Philosophy at Stellenbosch University and plans to pursue her PhD at the University of Fort Hare. She is also a contract lecturer in the Politics and Philosophy Department at the University of Fort Hare. Her master’s research explored violence as an anti-Black structure of relation in post-apartheid South Africa, with particular focus on intra-Black intersubjectivity, internalised anti-Blackness, and the psychic afterlives of apartheid through critical phenomenology and Black Consciousness thought.

Login Details:

Date: 19 May 2026
Time: 1: 00 pm–2: 00 pm SAST
Format: Virtual via Microsoft Teams

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/381819491557188?p=IwZppgg0M0PwHWPYkC

Meeting ID: 381 819 491 557 188

Passcode: iy7fV6gH

 

N.B: If you are interested in speaking in June, please email Werner F. Smith at w.s...@ufh.ac.za and copy Amara Esther Chimakonam at Amarae...@gmail.com. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

 

Thank you,

AE Chimakonam and WF Smith