Hosted by AVReQ’s Zandile Dywati and Cameron Farrar (Syracuse University), the Borders and Black Bodies: The ‘Placelessness’ of Blackness webinar brought together emerging scholars to engage the psychic, spatial and existential dislocations that define Black life across geographies. Drawing from South Africa, North America and the diaspora, the conversation moved through themes of ontology, memory and cosmology, reflecting on how Black people continue to make worlds in spaces that seek to erase them. In her opening, Zandile Dywati situated the gathering as a “dining table” for critical thought and radical imagination. Drawing from Achille Mbembe and Katherine McKittrick, she invited participants to think through placelessness not merely as physical displacement, but as the psychic and spiritual negation of Black being. “how do we map an alternative doing, becoming and survival for blackness,” she asked, “through black radical imagination, African feminist work, and memory as repair?”

Deficient Ontologies on Blackness and the Fact of Skin Colour and Beyond

Introducing the first panel, Cameron Farrar described it as an inquiry into the “deficient ontologies” that have shaped global understandings of Black life. Opening the discussion, Zandile Dywati’s presentation, The Dompassness of Black Skin, re-read South Africa’s pass laws as an enduring architecture of anti-Black surveillance. “The dompas,” she explained, “registered all Africans, their names, locales and movements,” rendering the Black body a bureaucratic object. Even in post-apartheid South Africa, she argued, this surveillance endures: “the Black skin constructed in an anti-Black world as a bodily border continues to function also as a border itself.” For Dywati, the challenge lies in imagining blackness “beyond the abyssal existence of exclusion and trauma,” where being itself is no longer policed by the colour of one’s skin.

Mohhadiah Rafique’s paper, Neither White nor Native: The Ongoing Denial, Erasure and Negotiation of Coloured Identity in South Africa, extended this interrogation beyond binary constructions of race. She traced the evolution of Coloured identity from its roots in the Khoi and San to the creolised Cape society of the seventeenth century, through to its policing under apartheid. Coloured people’s repositioning in the democratic era, she noted, “has left them not just displaced, but placeless.” For Rafique, this placelessness is not a lack of home, but a historical denial of belonging, a condition of existing “in a zone of non-being.” Yet within this rupture, she identified creativity and cultural endurance: “reclaiming colouredness as an evolving cultural and ethnic identity rather than a colonial label is an act of healing and resistance.”

Closing the panel, Quinton Apollis spoke on Deficient Ontologies and Humanising Praxis. Framing race as a social construct, he reflected on how law, morality and education reproduce the “historical construction of blackness as incomplete, othered and lacking.” Citing Frantz Fanon, he argued that “being human is not a given, but a political potentiality.” For Apollis, a truly decolonial future in higher education requires “humanising practice” that calls for ethical and structural transformation to reclaim the full humanity of Black life.

Together, the three papers traced how anti-Black worlds manufacture absence through racial surveillance, cultural erasure and institutional power, while also gesturing towards reclamation through imagination, history and praxis.

Realms of Memory, the Body, the Border and Displacement

The second panel turned to diasporic blackness, with Dannah Wilson and Cameron Farrar examining Black subjectivity in North America. In To Be Black, Gifted and Global, Wilson explored photography as a means of reclaiming home. Describing her Detroit-based project with Brightmoor youth, she argued that photography “is not merely about images, but about locating belonging across borders.” For her, representation and ownership are inseparable: “to be Black, gifted and global is not only to create, but to own our creative works and the places where they reside.” Wilson’s work reimagined the camera as both weapon and witness, capable of transforming Black visibility from surveillance into self-definition.

Farrar followed with a sobering account of Neoliberalism and the Function of Black Genocide Denialism. Mapping histories of racial violence in the United States, he argued that the “placelessness of blackness” is not accidental but structural, maintained through systems that make Black suffering culturally and economically reasonable. Citing petitions to the United Nations in 1951 and 2014 accusing the U.S. of genocide against Black Americans, Farrar called attention to the “circular reasoning of American suffering,” where the reproduction of inequality is seen as inevitable. His intervention exposed how neoliberalism transforms violence into policy, producing what he termed “a culture of denial.”

Beyond Corporeality, the Damned, the Dead and the Cosmologically Destitute

The final panel shifted from geography to cosmology, asking what becomes of Black being when land, body and spirit are severed. Dumoluhle Moyo began with Iphi Inkaba Yakho?, reinterpreting land not as property but as “an ancestral technology.” He urged a return to indigenous cosmologies that view umhlaba as sacred and relational, warning that the commodification of land has rendered Black people “cosmologically destitute.”

Building on this, Thabolwethu Maphosa’s Black Realms and Dwelling Otherwise explored umsamo, the ancestral space within the home, as a metaphor for Black futurity. Through poetry and theory, he described umsamo as “a realm of joy, ingenuity and survivance” where Black people “dwell otherwise” amid devastation.

Concluding the panel, Li’Tsoanelo Zwane’s presentation on Sangoma Cosmologies and the Praxis of Ubungoma reframed the gaze. Contesting the imperial eye, she foregrounded the sangoma as an organic intellectual whose embodied knowledge dislocates Western epistemic authority. Through divination, dreams and intuition, she argued that Black epistemologies reclaim the right to see and to name the world differently.

In closing, Cameron Farrar thanked the speakers and audience, reflecting that the day’s dialogue had demonstrated “how Black thought continues to map new cartographies of being within, against and beyond the borders that confine it.” He noted that the conversations across continents echoed a shared yearning for a world where Black existence is neither tolerated nor theorised but lived in fullness. “Our task,” he said, “is not simply to study Blackness but to practice its becoming, to make it dwellable again.” He ended by honouring the gathering as a moment of intellectual kinship, where scholarship itself became an act of care, an offering toward a future where the borders of Blackness no longer wound, but hold.