Against epistemic totalitarianism: the insurrectional politics of Bessie Head

This paper argues that South African writer, Bessie Head, crafted art that refuses discursive closure, or epistemic totalitarianism. The essay demonstrates this by examining Head's commitment to analysing power in the context of people's daily lives and her attention to the insurrectionary role of imagination in intervening in established dynamics of power. The first section draws connections between Head's practice of writing about ordinary people to her own experience and observations of living under South African apartheid. The second section focuses on the analytical links that Head makes between poverty, white privilege and institutional economic structures in order to demonstrate how her analysis of the rigidity of the system yielded an attentiveness to the need to be able to imagine other possibilities. The third section depicts Head's insurrectionary writing as part of a moral force that is, in part, a function of her analysis of the problem as an absence of imaginative possibilities. This, I suggest, indicates that – as with much critical African anti-colonial writing – Head's approach presents contemporary social theory with a challenge to epistemic totalitarianism that can be useful for addressing current issues.