This article analyzes Drucilla Cornell’s critical theory as a practice of engaging with radical thinking and radical politics in the interest of revolutionary transformation. Arguing that Walter Benjamin’s imperative to wrest tradition away from conformism is at the heart of Cornell’s work, the article shows how Cornell applies this imperative both to the tradition of resistance against oppression and to critical theory itself. The article follows Cornell’s call to decolonize the critical theoretical project by bringing Surinamese anticolonial activist and writer Anton de Kom, various collectives that participated in the 2022 German art festival documenta 15, and the disobedience of six young Palestinian “Freedom Riders” into conversation with Cornell’s writings on the South African Revolution and on Afro-Caribbean liberatory thought.

Drucilla Cornell engaged in scholarship and activism in South Africa for over a decade, and indeed she moved home from New York to Cape Town to participate more fully in the life and politics of the newly democratic country. This was not only a prolific period of scholarship and activism in her life, but also an inflection point in the country’s nascent constitutional jurisprudence. In this article, we memorialize Drucilla’s extraordinary contributions to the development of South Africa’s constitutional order and of its legal academy. We situate these contributions in the broader set of concerns—about dignity and freedom, socialism and democracy, non-Western ideals, feminism, modernity, and the constitution of community—with which she had been engaged since the earliest days of her career. We include relevant anecdotes from her life in South Africa; not only her life as a scholar but also as a teacher, mentor, friend, and above all, a revolutionary activist.

A short reflection on Drucilla Cornell’s distinctive modes of doing political theory, inhabiting academic spaces, communicating important ideas, loving, and enacting fierce loyalty in the face of political bullying.

This memoriam essay begins with a reflection on the author’s relationship to Drucilla Cornell, the famed activist, revolutionary legal theorist, social and political philosopher, playwright, and biographer. It then proceeds to examine her contributions to Africana existential revolutionary thought and the Caribbean-inspired project of shifting the geography of reason.

This article pays homage to Drucilla Cornell through examining her writings on ubuntu not only as a jurisprudential concept, but also as a philosophical and ethical concept. Cornell’s incisive ability to synthesize Kant’s idealism of the realm of ends and the African philosophy of ubuntu, combined with her revolutionary spirit, deepened understanding of the South African constitutional values and principles. Exploring the interpretation of ubuntu by the South African Constitutional Court, it shows how Cornell advanced an ubuntu-inspired ethical ideal that informs and shapes dignity as the Grundnorm of the South African Constitution. For Cornell, as a transformative ethic, ubuntu imposes obligations upon us to live up to ideals in our relationships with each other and to ideals of the new democracy. Cornell championed the idea of a substantive revolution brought about by the Constitution and argued for a reading of the South African Constitution against these aspirational ideals.

This essay offers a critical reading of Drucilla Cornell’s writings on the concept of ubuntu in South Africa, a country with which she had a deeply committed, complicated, ambivalent relationship. It explores her arguments for the contemporary relevance of this deeply rooted cultural concept—despite its appropriation and commodification at the hands of global market forces—not merely to the everyday life of Black South Africans but also for a transformative constitutionalism; a progressive jurisprudence, that is, addressed to the accomplishment of a more equal and ethical post-apartheid society. In so doing, it analyzes how Cornell, a playwright and philosopher committed to estranging the familiar, turned the skepticism of ubuntu redolent among white South African scholars and public intellectuals back on itself by rooting her argument for its continued significance in a combination of ethnographic discovery and the legal history of the present.