Can religious epistemology aid in the transformation of the world to the same effect as Marxist Theory? Utilizing an approach derived from Louis Althusser's isolation of the radical implications of the epistemological break of Karl Marx, from his Feuerbachain theological thought to a materialist epistemological tradition, we probe the relationship between the mystical intent of Christian theology and the appearance of praxis as a category derived from the Marxist lexicon, within the modus cogitans of Latin American theology of liberation. We problematise the transcendentalism that liberation theology places on social practice, in its retention of a spiritualist Weltanschauung as the preeminent framework for the critique of socio-historical reality. Far from being a materialist-transformative "epistemological break" from orthodox theology, this putative theology of revolution is thus exposed as being a brand of a Hegelian theosophy, which is discontinuous with the dialectical understanding of the socio-material basis of human relations that emerges around Marxist Theory, namely praxis. Our leitmotif is therefore a claim that political theology, qua theology in general, and the Latin American Theology of Liberation in particular, have a limited efficacy as a theoretical tool for socio-political transformation, due to its inherent transcendentalist and rationalistic orientation.

We are, at the close of the twentieth century, at a point in time when the dominance of the universe of European singularity is being encompassed or engulfed by the multiverse of our shared humanity. The colonizer, self-deified imperial Europe, is dead! (p. 52)Nearly 20 years since this proclamation of the death of the epistemic emperor, Europe and his Eurocentric universalism, and nearly 30 years since Appiahs' critique of African 'nativistic consciousness' in his In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992:47-72), in this putative era of the global village and multiversalism, African modes of self-knowledge and expression are still battling for space in the mainline academy, including in universities on the African continent. Equally, the idealised global culture and ethic is proving to be laced with an ever-increasing Western paranoid nationalism, border politics, antiblack racism and the tendency to treat Africans as a surplus people. 31.See James & Sterger (eds), Globalisation and culture (2010:xii-xv). 2.From the title of the book Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Appiah & Gutmann 1996). 3.Images of black deaths in the Mediterranean sea, anti-African immigration into Europe; Hage's (2003) study of racism in Australia; police killings of black people in the USA; persistence of socio-economic discrimination against black livelihood in post-apartheid South Africa and so on.Background: An era and academic milieu that clamour at post-racialist and globalist theoretical frameworks juxtaposed with evidence of growing anti-black dehumanizing racism, and the persistence of psycho-social alienation of black learners in multi-racial educational institutions.Aim: To engage in a critical philosophical-phenomenological and political review of the experience of being-black-in-the-world as a factor that justifies the establishment and maintenance of Black Studies programmes. The article seeks to contribute to the debate on the vagaries accompanying the institutionalisation of culturo-epistemic exclusive spaces for socially suppressed selfhoods in a postmodern academy.Setting: Racialised social environments as affecting Higher Education, with post-apartheid South Africa as a case.Methods: Existential Philosophy, Black Consciousness and Paulo Freire's philosophy of education. Results:The category of blackness as derived from a Fanonian existential phenomenology and Steve Biko's perspective, contrasted against Achille Mbembe's semiological-hermeneutic and cosmopolitan treatment of blackness, is an existential-ontological reality that should function as a cardinal category in educational planning, justifying specialised learning and knowledgeexchange spaces for the re-humanisation of black existence. Conclusion:The experience of black existential reality, conceived from blackhood as an external recognition and an internally self-negotiated consciousness within the social immanence of whiteness, justifies the institutionalisation of learning spaces and programmes that are aimed at nurturing a...

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A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. We subject Senghor's life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James's critique of globalism as an ideology of globalisation; (2) Walter Mignolo's enunciation of the epistemico-cultural implications of Western-led globalisation on the postcolony; and (3) Paulin Houtondji's Afrocentric critical literary theory. The result is a claim we make that in the devotion of his literary talent and intellectual prowess to the nurturing of the 'French way', Senghor not only nurtured an imperialistic French globalism, but betrayed an opportunity to assert a political space for an enduring decolonial African epistemology during a critical period in the history of Africa's relationship with Europe. Senghor's life praxis is in this way presented as a typology of the psychopolitical pitfalls facing African thought leaders in their postcolonial engagement with Western modernity.

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