A Royal Crescent (Hybrid Autofiction)

The Royal Crescent is a hybrid work of memoir, philosophy, and psychogeography. Moving between South Africa, Bath, and London, the aftermath of a relationship begins the tracing of racial taxonomy to its origin, not in the psyche but in the land. The Roman castrum, the Latin word for a ‘cut’ of territory, reappears across two thousand years of stone and language. Departing from Afropessimism's despair without abandoning its rigour, the book argues that the boundary inscribes rather than describes a difference, that the cut is in the middle of something continuous. An account of shame, The Royal Crescent asks what it means to love learning when the language that one thinks in was built to keep them out.