Abstract

This essay offers a critical reading of Drucilla Cornell’s writings on the concept of ubuntu in South Africa, a country with which she had a deeply committed, complicated, ambivalent relationship. It explores her arguments for the contemporary relevance of this deeply rooted cultural concept—despite its appropriation and commodification at the hands of global market forces—not merely to the everyday life of Black South Africans but also for a transformative constitutionalism; a progressive jurisprudence, that is, addressed to the accomplishment of a more equal and ethical post-apartheid society. In so doing, it analyzes how Cornell, a playwright and philosopher committed to estranging the familiar, turned the skepticism of ubuntu redolent among white South African scholars and public intellectuals back on itself by rooting her argument for its continued significance in a combination of ethnographic discovery and the legal history of the present.