Towards a '(post-)apartheid' critical race jurisprudence : 'divining our racial themes'

Abstract

In this article, I repeat arguments made elsewhere on the importance of critical race scholarship in South African legal thinking. Critical 'outsider' jurisprudence is a developing genre of legal enquiry and needs to be considered in analyses of legal reform, human rights, constitutionalism, transformation, transitional justice and reconciliation. While divergent feminist legal theories, certain strands of 'queer' legal theory, US and Euro-Brit Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have received wide coverage within South African legal scholarship, vibrant jurisprudential movements such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), postcolonial jurisprudence and Black Feminism have remained largely absent from post-apartheid critical legal discourse. Not only does the markedly 'white' character of South African critical and postmodern legal theory explain the paucity of critical race theory - the general critique levelled at CLS scholars in the US by CRT scholars for their failure to come to terms with the particularity of race and racism in their analysis of how law is a site for the production of ideological practices, politics and social power applies also to South African Crits and postmodern legal theorists in their engagement with the post-apartheid legal culture.