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Post-Liberal Futures: Epistemic Justice, Ontological Freedom and the Black Archive offers a sustained philosophical critique of liberalism’s inability to secure epistemic justice, ontological recognition and non-domination in postcolonial contexts. Taking South Africa as a central site of analysis, the book interrogates the juridical and epistemological paradoxes that emerge when liberal constitutionalism encounters Indigenous knowledge systems and reasoning traditions. It argues that the persistence of these tensions signals not a failure of implementation, but a limit internal to liberal thought itself.
In response, the book advances the Black Archive as both a conceptual framework and an institutional project, drawing on African intellectual traditions, Indigenous languages, literature and aesthetic forms as sites of theory. Through this archive, it develops a post-liberal account of democracy grounded in relational ontologies, coeval epistemologies and practices of repair. The work ultimately reimagines democratic life beyond the universalisms of liberalism, offering a rigorous account of how alternative traditions can inform more just and contextually responsive futures.
Siseko H. Kumalo is a political theorist and Associate Professor at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies at the University of Johannesburg, whose work advances African philosophy, decolonial theory, and higher education transformation. His scholarship centres the Black Archive as a living epistemic resource to reimagine knowledge, pedagogy, and democratic life beyond liberal paradigms.