Overview

The Colour of Inequality in South Africa and Brazil offers a radical departure by pivoting quotidian encounters of the historically oppressed ‘black racialised underclass’ within South Africa’s and Brazil’s social policy architectures that have been shaped by transhistorical trajectories of hierarchical citizenships. Phiri provides two interventions to scholarship, one on ‘the epistemic question’ and the second on ‘the social question’, by offering a critique of a racialised neoliberal global political economy that permeates the two countries’ social policies. In this volume, Phiri answers the following questions. First, can social policy resolve the residuals and contradictions of transhistorical inequalities that have become systemic features of these aspirant democracies that aim to forge a new social contract under the epoch of a hierarchical racialised neoliberal capitalism? Second, cognisant that both South Africa’s and Brazil’s socio-political formations are enmeshed in histories of imperial violence, and a hierarchical racialised global political economy carved through the Trans-Atlantic slavery, what paradigmatic and theoretical tools can be deployed to think about social policy as reparations? Third, cognisant of South Africa’s and Brazil’s oppressed black majorities, which institutions will create conducive conditions for the flourishing and political aesthetics for those racialised as black? The author's contribution to this oeuvre is first to define ‘social policy as reparations’ through a process of ‘worldmaking’.

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Madalitso Zililo Phiri is a Post Doctoral Fellow in the South Africa United Kingdom Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is co-author of Monuments and Memory in Africa: Reflections on Coloniality and Decoloniality (Routledge, 2024). Phiri’s publications include book chapters and refereed journal articles in outlets such as History of Intellectual Culture, Critical Sociology, Monthly Review, Global Health Promotion, Journal of Southern African Studies, and South African Journal of International Affairs.

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