In his monograph Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa, Chielozona Eze examines a number of texts that imagine a sense of belonging and inclusion in postapartheid South Africa. These texts articulate a different logic from that which organized the racial system of exclusion and difference that has configured the idea of South Africa since the time of colonial encounters. In this study, Eze invites the reader into conversations about cosmopolitanism and global citizenship in an effort to make a world that transcends the logic of equivalence and seeks to overcome a past mediated by violence. By engaging with the writings of Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, Greig Coetzee, Ivan Vladislavic, Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, Elisa Galgut, Antjie Krog, and Ingrid de Kok and lucidly tying them to the context of postapartheid South Africa, Eze articulates his theorisation of global citizenship, which functions as a central organising theme of his book. In Eze's vision, South Africa is a product of historical contingency and complex processes, and global citizenship can remake our world by overcoming the inherent limits of decolonisation and postapartheid South Africa.

This book focuses on decolonisation in the context of postapartheid South Africa and the making of South Africa. In Chapter One, Eze takes as a point of departure the experience and expression of belonging in South Africa as revealed in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He argues that postapartheid South Africa was anchored to a moral obligation. Eze then proceeds to advocate for global citizenship in Chapter Two by exploring how Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu led their lives embedded in empathy, which is a key component of cosmopolitanism and reconciliation. In Chapter Three, the author presents the works of Zakes Mda and Njabulo Ndebele to warn against losing Mandela's vision of reconciliation and cosmopolitanism in postapartheid South Africa. He continues to advocate for a model of cosmopolitanism by showing how its empathetic underpinnings can banish elitism in Chapter Four. For Eze, empathy is crucial in so far as it offers a step towards constructing and remaking a world that is not haunted by the spectre of exclusionary articulations. In Chapter Five, the author pulls further on the theme he explored in Chapter Three by calling for a need to overcome or resist reverse racism that has engineered imaginations of nationhood influenced by discrimination, prejudice, and exclusion. His analysis hinges on the notion that identity is a flexible concept rooted in a sense of relations with others as opposed to an expression of self; hence Eze's exploration of how literature approaches transcultural exchange affects to celebrate different cultures and identities. In Chapter Six, the author draws attention to questions of the past as they shape the present, but pushes beyond them to promote a logic of inclusion as a foundational principle for a better society and alternative mode of coexistence in a globalised world.

Eze has produced a well-argued and intellectually refreshing book on the cosmopolitan model of global citizenship, which drives his vision for a better world that transcends violent histories. But a closer analysis reveals that he does not go far enough in highlighting the connections between the achievement of global citizenship and the resolution of economic inequalities. The idea of an inclusive South Africa in particular has proved particularly vexing because of issues related to the ownership of resources and the practical actualisation of democracy for historically marginalized peoples. This perspective leaves one hard pressed to understand how the moral philosophy of Ubuntu — which Eze proposes as a theory of moral value that is characteristic of African claims about humanism and conformity to communal will — can reconstruct a better world that transcends the prejudices and exclusionary politics of belonging. I think the author could have pushed further to consider economic factors. That is, as long as economic and social aspirations of the formerly oppressed are denigrated and the profits gained from the skewed colonial policies and practices remain intact, the past will continue to throw up toxic questions about inclusion and integration that render Ubuntu inadequate as a basis for empathetic cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, with the current trends of violence in postapartheid South Africa, Eze's book is valuable, highly relevant, and potentially very useful. It opens up more areas of interrogation and conversations on understanding the past and shows how those narratives of articulation of belonging are important in the theorisation of global citizenship.