The Introduction of ‘ColCrit’: Critical Race Theory Within a Coloured Perspective Scholarship

Abstract

The Critical Race Theory (CRT) project in South Africa calls for a critical analysis of prevailing perceptions and implications of belonging to a certain racial group in post-apartheid South Africa. It further calls for an examination of the ways in which the said status quo perpetuates ‘relations of domination, oppression and injustice’ in the present day, as articulated by Joel Modiri. The purpose of my dissertation is to argue for the further advancement in the existing CRT scholarship, that is, a layering of CRT by developing a body of scholarship pertaining to the coloured racial group in South Africa. This stance is taken in order to address the problem that the existing CRT scholarship in South Africa approaches race in essentialist terms, which mainly caters to the black African racial group, to the exclusion of the coloured group. The proposed scholarship provides critical analyses in relation to the two broad aims of CRT mentioned above, focusing on the particular features and needs of the coloured group. This entails the importation of perspective scholarship within South African CRT, defined by Martha Fineman as ‘a body of scholarship that is built explicitly upon the assertion of relevant differences among people’ and these ‘relevant differences’ will be used to inform particularised accounts and provide particularised solutions for the coloured group. The proposed scholarship will also address the problem of South African Critical Race Theory being overly theoretical, by arguing for the development of SA CRT towards a more reconstructionist approach, that is, scholarship that transcends theoretical discourse and aimed at proposing more immediately implementable solutions to the identified challenges