Thinking from and through oppression

Abstract

We must honor our teachers. In The Perversity of Gratitude Grant Farred honors his best teachers at Livingstone High School and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), both institutions intended for people classified as “coloured” by apartheid. He affirms, with Martin Heidegger that: Denken ist Danken. Thinking is thanking. His sense of gratitude, sometimes expressed as debt, goes beyond the desire togive committed teachers their due though. He insists that “The terms upon whichThe Perversity of Gratitude stands are unambiguous: Disenfranchised apartheid edu-cation constituted fertile ground for thinking.”2 For this he expresses “the perversityof gratitude.”The book, always resolutely dialectical and part philosophical meditation and partmemoir, is as tender as it is forcefully contrarian. It is simultaneously linear andhelical as it moves toward its affecting conclusion. It rewards close, slow and repeatedreading.