The South African Student #Fallist Movements: Xenophobia and the Impossibility of Including the African 'Other'

The embodied reading strategy I develop in this article provides us with an alternative to the large literature that reads #RMF from the global North. My argument is that this approach is crucial if we are to understand the South African student movements from locations elsewhere across Africa. This highlights the connections and disconnections between the many histories of decolonisation across the African continent. The attention to the geo-historical positioning of the body of the black students in these protest movements shows the nuances around the historical impossibility of the Fallist movements to accommodate the body of the African Other, whose presence remains unintelligible in the spaces between the two geo-historical spaces. This disjuncture of the body is evident in the discord that was the violence of xenophobia. The Fallist movements showed that knowledge production takes place within a space of racial violence, a form of violence that is provoked by the marginality produced by high theory on the one side and xenophobia on the other. The article suggests how an embodied understanding of the archives of violence and agency propose 'continued' disruption as a meaningful way to challenge a colonial approach to knowledge production.