Drawing on Africana political thought, black existentialism, and settler colonial and indigenous studies, Madlingozi advances a decolonial approach to debates over the strivings of historically colonised and enslaved people for 'home.'

With a focus on South Africa, Madlingozi explores strivings by impoverished black communities to constitute an inclusive polity in which citizens 'stand together' and belong affectively and materially. If settler colonial constitution-making shattered the socio-cultural worlds of indigenous peoples, producing 'native' pariahdom, homelessness and worldlessness, the original impulse of anti-colonial struggles was Mayibuye iAfrika or to Return/Re-member/Resurrect Africa. This demands re-constituting 'South Africa' on the spiritual, social and material planes and constitution-makers undergoing processes of disalienation, rebirth, and of returning from liminal worlds. Only then might they contribute to 'African renaissance,' creolising national consciousness, and nation-becoming towards pluriversality.

Madlingozi offers positive models in Es'kia Mphahlele's Afrikan Humanness, Steve Biko's Black Consciousness and Abahlalism, which, unlike the borrowings of early twentieth-century African leaders from New World W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, drew from but ultimately transcended ideas of the Négritude and Pan-African movements.