“The Universal is the Entire Collection of Particulars”: Grounding Identity in a Shared Horizon of Humanity

This essay examines the poetry of anti-apartheid and civil rights activist Keorapetse Kgositsile who struggled for racial equality in South Africa and while in exile in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that his poetry presents an alternative to circumscribed rights discourses that are imposed within exclusionary racial, national, and cultural ‘particulars’ by hegemonic institutions such as the nation-state, even as they claim to be universalizing. At the same time, he retains an open-ended discursive notion of the universal as the basis for identity, to be realized only through the particular lived experiences of individuals. Such an open-ended universalism cannot be easily co-opted by power precisely because it is slippery and shape-shifting. Every person, in this schema, is a particular, unique addition to a universal horizon of humanity. Rather than setting up the particular in opposition to the universal, Kgositsile harnesses a flexible free-verse poetic form that posits the universal as an unbounded sum of particulars and formulates a revitalized version of humanism as a basis for identity instead. This essay argues that Kgositsile’s exile poetry points to a theoretical space where the cultural and national specificity of certain human rights oppressions, and the fight against them, must necessarily open out into the humane and the universal, tearing across national boundaries to point towards the commonalities that underpin human life and ethics.