This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations:(1) what I call a "psychometric imaginary"; (2) an assumption that "race" is given, homogeneous and stable; (3) contact/noncontact dualism; and (4) inattention to whiteness. These limitations locate contact theory within raciological thought, making contact a reformist, rather than transformative antiracist strategy. I suggest an alternative: a critical literacy for the use of "race." Contrary to Pettigrew's (1998) call for conceptual economy, I argue that conceptual expansion better serves understanding the tenacity of "race" and complexities of racism(s). Contrary to the psychometric imaginary of contact theory, I suggest that we need a visionary political imaginary for an antiracist world. I conclude that the key question for transforming intergroup relations in South Africa is not "which conditions," and "what kinds of" contact are necessary, but "what kinds of politics, knowing, seeing and belonging" are necessary for critical antiracist praxis.

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How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological accounts of the human? To grapple with this question I clarify five key concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the autopoietic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on parts of Wynter’s oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations with Anthony Bogues. Wynter invents a Third Emergence of the world to mark the advent of the human as a hybrid being. She challenges Western conceptions that reduce the human to biological properties. In opposition to Western teleology, her counter-cartography of a history of human life offers a relational conception of human existence which pivots around Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s call for a conception of the human made to the measure of the world, not to the measure of ‘Man’. This makes Wynter’s theory counter-, not post-humanist.

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In the United States of America, use of DNA samples in criminal investigation and of genetic ancestry tests in 'personalised medicine', 'pharmacogenetics' and for personal consumption has grown exponentially. Moreover