This book has been a long journey. At least I was not alone in this long walk. I was part of the chorus of the long song and many interlocutors to it, near and far, have kept it alive. I am thankful to them.

I would like to thank Victoria Collins-Buthelezi for her encouragement and friendship, which led to her soliciting this manuscript. Natalia Brizuela is also worth mentioning for her warm messages of encouragement and being an interlocutor. In addition, I wish to extend my appreciation to the editorial collective of Critical South in Polity Press, of which these two aforementioned comrade scholars are part. These include Judith Butler, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Rosaura Martínez, Vladimir Safatle, Gisela Cantazaro, Françoise Verges, and Felwine Sarr. The invaluable support of John Thompson, the director of Polity Press, is humbling. Thanks to Evie Deavall, and my amazing editor at Polity Press, Susan Beer, who took me through this project with grace and loads of laughter.

The Africa Decolonial Research Network is always a home, and it is where this book was conceptualized right through to its completion. Thanks to my mentor, Sabelo “Mdala” Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for spearheading this collective. The Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, has been my home and it is where I found time to work on this book.

Jane and Lewis R. Gordon saw the work at its sketchy phase and inspired me to push on. I thank them for the journey we have travelled with it. They opened their home for my visits and their love is greatly appreciated as always. I also want to thank for intellectual support, as well as for warm friendship: Robin D.G. Kelly, Hortense J. Spillers, Ronald A.T. Judy, John and Jean Comaroff, James Manigault-Bryant, Linda Alcoff, Andrea Pitts, Charles Mills, Calvin Warren, Frank B. Wilderson III, Aaron Kamugisha, Paget Henry, Sarah Cervenak, J. Kameron Carter, Nathaniel Mackey, Dan Woods, Reiland Rabaka, Molefi K. Asante, Neil Roberts, and V.Y. Mudimbe. Tons of thanks go to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ramon Grosfoguel, Roberto D. Hernández, and Pablo Gonzalez, who are the uncompromising decolonial scholars who pushed me to sharpen my lenses. Laura Harris and Fred Moten gave me an awesome world of generosity, and I am deeply indebted as always.

The manuscript was gracefully engaged by Kenneth Taffira (may his soul rest in power), Cyprian Mpungose, Marzia Milazzo, Siphamandla Zondi, Luthando Ngema, Muntu Vilakazi, Lebohang Motsomotso, Boshadi Semenya, Zingisa Nkosinkulu, Marule Lentsoane, Maurice Vambe, Lunga Mkila, Mpho Maake, Kgomotso Masemola, Sam Raditlhalo, and Mante Mphahlele.

Thanks to Thabang Monoa, Sindisiwe and Salim Washington, Jessica Russel, Hlulani Mdingi, Tumi Mogorosi, Gabi Motuba, Katlego Pilane, Nombulelo Siwane, Aneesa Khan, Sipho Mantula, Edith Phaswana, Paul “Rude Boy Paul” Mnisi, Mosa Motha, Sibusiso Maseko, Julia Simango, Mwelela Cele, Lesley Hadfield, and Ontlotlile Seemela.

To my late uncle, Mohlalifi Jacob Lebele, who never lived to see this book, I would say robala ka kgotso Letsitsi. Many thanks to my brothers, Tshepo Lebele and Tshepiso Molepo, for your generosity. To my fallen comrade, Kasay Sentime, thanks for the critical reading of Chapters 1, 2, and 3, when this book was in its infant stages.

Tendayi Jr., Chanise, Sibusiso, Dyani wa Matekwe – you are the reason I breathe. I am glad we share the jazz spirit, and we sing Don Cherry chants together in corrupted notes of the avant-garde. My love for jazz is my love for you!

All my work is made possible by the prayers of Papa and Ma Sithole. All my love to you.

To those whose names I have forgotten to include here, mea culpa, and please know that I am always humbled by your support at different stages of this book. All the errors in the book are mine, mine alone.

What precedes the black register?

Will it have been proper to associate what it is to record, or to bear again, with what it is to rule, or guide? To consider a problematic of visual alignment in (non)alignment with a problematic of aural atunement? The row, and its hard way, is part of an audiovisual seriality, a series of sensual problems and problems of sense, a spectrum of concerns for meaning, itself, that take a wavering, spectral, moaning line that won’t and can’t stop twisting, folding, creasing, and turning in return, finally, to feel. How is a movement of nonalignment braided with the movement of the nonaligned? The book that is now in your hands gives this as a South African question concerning Pan-African desire. Tendayi Sithole’s The Black Register can’t and won’t quite keep it straight, in the canted Wohnung of black indigeneity, of what it is to have been displaced in place, to have been relegated to a homeland that is not home at home, to be exiled to a reservation, to live in and as what Heidegger calls “standing-reserve,” which is genocidally to be taken as and for a resource, while also having been taken away from the general and generative beauty of being-resource in an unsettled field of sharing. The black register re-instantiates that sharing, while also recording that it has been taken. It is expropriative. It releases, rather than retakes, what has been taken. It moves in what it is to seek and practice anti-coloniality’s embrace of displacement by way of the refusal of the colonial imposition of displacement, recognizing that the brutality that attends this duality in and of displacement isn’t so much a European thing as it is that commitment to murderous thingification out of which the very idea of Europe emerges.

The Black Register shows us how the black register works. What is the relationship between displacement and registration in Sithole’s grammar? Black study is a field of open questioning and Sithole is an accelerant of that fire, a proliferant of its recesses and gatherings, and itinerant but unscheduled stoppages, and unending terminations and broken persistences, which do not so much purify as blur, in burning. The field is strewn with what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls no-bodies, so that the non-opposition of decay and bloom becomes our particular burden, a condition whose curative immediacy we must devise a way to show and move. We are constrained to practice this showing, to show this showing in our practice of it. It is an empirical mysticism that abjures what the beautiful ensemble we refer to is – that which Stuart Hall calls the empiricist attitude. The black register overflows and undercuts itself, is always more and less than itself, and this non-fullness and non-simplicity is shown, registered, recorded, discorded, disordered, and practiced in The Black Register.

On this broken edge, what’s the relationship between analysis and the all-at-once? Between world and subdivision? Maybe these are François Laruelle’s questions, which shade some of Bertrand Russell’s toward being turned inside out by Ed Roberson’s. What if mysticism, which is metaphysic’s flesh and fugitive core, is Tendayi’s tendency to see the earth before the end of the world? For lack of more precise terms, which the quest for greater precision always exposes as a kind of devotion, let’s call this being-empirical without an attitude: no settled position, no emotional or epistemological truculence, just this deep, shared, entropic sensing. Such seeing, such registration, such re-gestation, must be under duress. There is no redress of or for this ruthless restlessness. There’s nothing but the imperative to address it with(in its) absolute and unmediated obliquity, tilted, off, side-eyed, glancing. Notice is bent, appositional. Blackness can’t be registered but it does register because it is registration. A way of measure that drives the will to account straight, cold, geocidally crazy. What kind of account, and of what, does the unaccountable give? Or does it give the account away? Or is the account, in the unaccountable, foregiven?

Blackness does not give an account of itself in the black register or in The Black Register. But this is not due to a puritanical imperative against ethical experiment in the gap between description and portrayal. Somehow, predication is our funhouse. In the funnyhouse of the Negro we come up with nicknames for our prior and seductive resistance to their naming and we fall apart in the horror of how they try to tear us apart, to temper what remains off scale, which is their reaction to how our nickname ain’t the same as their name even though they seem to sound the same. In other words, given that we can measure or record or account for neither what we are nor what they’ve done to us, what is the black register? An illicit, woven accounting of that which only has one name, the name of the one who kills the innumerable, the unnameable? Or, if what the black register is white, does its limit disappear in the disappearance of its object? Will the black register white’s disappearance, in the lonely instant of the last analysis, as its own fade? Register’s rich field of definition is like a field of proliferate recess. A test. But what are we testing for? There’s the black register, the mechanical reproduction of subjectivity’s residuum, and then there’s the fact that blackness won’t be registered. This is the line Sithole walks with the broken faithfulness of a man in black, the line between skin and livery indeterminate, Johnny Cash singing the body in question’s questions, black skein, white masque, as Bongani Madondo might say.

What’s the relationship between the black register and the real? What’s the relation between the social and the psychic?

The “re” in register, the “re” in record, is of things, of res, of the real. What if the problem with Lucretius is that there is no nature of things? What if there’s just the way of things, or maybe even a way to things, an approach, that is, in the end, in having no end, in its obliteration of ends, also a way from things, a veering away from things that is given, as it were initially, as a veering away in things, in black things, which makes them not quite understandable, or accountable, or to be registered? What if what precedes the black register is unprecedented? An approach not so much to things, even, but to the real, the realistic spot, the neighborhood, the holographic, holosensual field? But “re” is not only of things and their dispersion, emanation/coalescence, and sharing: it also bears the repeat, as if the peat of repeat is folded or pleated into things as their reverberation, the verberation or murmuration being already in the “re,” already of the real, this buzz or hum or doubling or blurring of edge, the edgy edgelessness of things, their blue-black smokiness, like a garment – a shawl or a warm woolen sweater, some kind of laborious weaving wrapped with a tightness that works the difference between chemise and skin – not so much worn but traversed and absorbed or imbibed, as if it were Laphroaig. The record of the thing, the repetition of the thing, is already in the thing which therefore constitutes the thing’s nothingness, its nonbeing in being more and less than itself. The black register is where the dual delusion of the in/dividual – where some infernal alignment will have occurred that posits separation without difference rather than difference without separation – is seen for what it is by we who refuse to see it and to be seen within it. It has a grammatical effect. What if the sound pattern of English took rhythm into account? What if rhythm messes with syntax in a way that makes sentences not seem quite right? Is there a critical writing that scans, sees, but as if from within what it sees, in a way that defies normative scansion and the grammar it attends and implies, a grammar/scansion that itself implies the hegemony of the whole number? Sithole says a little prayer for us in a black musical way, in a real, in an anarithmetical way, an Arethametical way, a real, the real, arererererererethmetical way, an a-rhythmetical way, a nonmetrical way, an acousmetrical way, a matrical way. His sentences buzz like the bush of ghosts with words that are more and less than themselves. The work is disintegratively anintegered. It’s Tutuolan in its atonal antotality, just as the black register welcomes this constant gathering as that which won’t quite come together in having gone past. The Black Register is a bush of hosts.

What if one of the questions that the specificity of South Africa requires you to ask is how the devolution from individual to dividual, from disciplinary society to society of control, was already given there in the intensity and particularity of a settler coloniality that never had the brutal luxury of a myth of autochthony from which a “demographic” problem could emerge? What if, here, the demographic problem could never have been seen as anything other than that which awaits the settler as he incorporates and excludes “his” surroundings? There, in that place, in that social situation, but also by way of the physics and sociology the unsettled allow and demand and require, the Kantian/Newtonian metaphysical and political laws of in/dividuality, or discipline/control or even discipline → control break down. The black register sees and bears and instantiates that breakdown, is what I want to say that Sithole is saying. But how do you say that, in writing? What graphics don’t so much correspond to but bear that insight, as a matter of sound and sounding? What entropy, what disorder, what revolt is borne in every string of words? Again, this is a question concerning Sithole’s music. It is a question to be played on, and by, an African Pan.

Diaspora detached from practice in the enactment of identity is the neoliberalization of Pan-Africanism, which was a neighborhood thing or, more precisely, nothing but what we do in the realistic spot, in its diffuse and irreducible nonlocality, out from abstractions of the nation-state in the nation-state’s hold, underneath or on the outskirts of the polis, in the place of dis/place/meant that Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick and Abdoumaliq Simone talk about with Sylvia Wynter and Amiri Baraka – the district, the territory, the mill quarters, the demonic ground, the way of things where in/dividuation breaks down. The Black Register feels that and forms its own reverberations and Steven Biko is at the heart of this, for Sithole, as Fanon’s situated extension. Our Pan-African desire is in and for a rent party, or a house party, for self-defense in self-refusal. Not the real thing but the realistic spot because there is neither a national structure nor a personal agent for our more and less than political desire. The black register is theory’s experimental band practice, its anaTrinidadian panorama, and when we sit in with Sithole and the ensemble he forms, and which forms him, in prison’s fetid, open air with Assata Shakur and George Jackson, in massacre’s continuance, we have to want to be ready because when they play, they plays all that and then some. Reading Biko with Mabogo P. More in the wake of Wynter reading Fanon, and Wynter through the echo of Fanon and Aimé Cesaire in Biko, Sithole feels and means all that, hearing, listening, looping, phonoseismographically feeding back, in measure, the immeasurable.

Fred Moten