Sabelo’s project examines how epistemology frames ontology. His project investigates how imperial/colonial epistemes have reproduced themselves in the form of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak termed ‘postcolonial reason’ and how this in turn informed a very problematic postcolonial political modernity characterized by conflicts and violence related to postcolonial state-making, postcolonial nation-building and democratization.
Conceptually, Sabelo’s project advocates for a transformative justice predicated on decolonizing the political community as an act of thinking and imagining a state which is decoupled from the nation so as to enable a citizen-state different from a nation-state. Empirically, South Africa and Zimbabwe constitute the sites for research with a focus of political cultures and practices.
