ABSTRACT
The Alan Taylor Residence for Black medical students of the white “liberal” University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, was the site of a unique experiment in coalitional Black Consciousness, an experiment that drew in subaltern youth racialized as Indian or Coloured, who emerged from complex submerged oceanic histories of forced migration and oppression and who sought to forge solidarity with the African majority in powerfully embodied, earthy, and spatial ways. Shaped by their context and limited by the racial infrastructure of the apartheid city, this strand of Black Consciousness did, however, bring some young people to inhabit a space of political hope beyond the temporalities of apartheid and of the dominant liberation movements. While this capacious and internationalist form of Black politics was brutally suppressed, its lessons in a decolonial education in a Black politics continue to inspire several currents today that are completely uninterested in the quest for sovereignty or capital that preoccupies the political elite. While “Alan Taylor” is the site of the ruination of coalitional Blackness premised on the hope of actual and material solidarity with struggles of Black Africans in the hope of building an shared future, these ruins of a decolonial education persist as rehearsals for a different political Blackness for our time of planetary and racial-capitalist emergency.
