Black sensemaking | Discretion 

Grace A. Musila
Department of African Literature
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

This lecture thinks through the logic of discretion as a practice and ethic in many Black societies. Here, I zone in on nodes of Black cultural practices as well as literary|artistic representations, to track how discretion functions in these communities’ modes of sense-making. Although adjacent to secrecy — a concern which has received extensive scholarly attention — discretion encompasses and exceeds secrecy in a range of ways. I make a case for discretion as a keyword in African studies which has been variously overlooked or miscrecognised in academic discourse for two reasons: first, owing to discretion’s complicity in the production of harm in when it serves to maintain silence around harmful practices; and second, due to the academy’s fetish of knowing, which assumes that every aspect of African lifeworlds should be knowable, legible. I use these twin factors behind discretion’s misrecognition as a point of departure to think through discretion’s place in Black sense-making by setting its complicity in harm, in conversation with its role in the making and preservation of personhood in Black communities. 

The paper is interested in the implications of the tension between the academy’s investment in knowing as a necessary good; and discretion’s invitation to uphold opacity in certain contexts, as a life-making practice. What are the implications of discretion’s invitation to uphold illegibility for the knowledge project, broadly speaking? How can we repurpose discretion as an ethic and practice of Black sense-making without colluding in harm production?