Overview

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community's resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. Canham shows that Mpondo theory is grounded in and develops in relation to the natural world, where the river and hill are key sites of being and resistance. Central too, is the interface between ancestors and the living, in which life and death become a continuity and a boundlessness that white supremacy and neoliberalism cannot interdict. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient

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9781478019596

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Reviews

"""Darkly and lyrically written, Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes is a transdisciplinary treatise theorizing Blackness through death. It offers Afrocentric theoretical and methodological resources for history, anthropology, and Black and indigenous studies, as well as critical perspectives for living in the wake of violence."" -- Casey Golomski * American Historical Review *"

""Darkly and lyrically written, Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes is a transdisciplinary treatise theorizing Blackness through death. It offers Afrocentric theoretical and methodological resources for history, anthropology, and Black and indigenous studies, as well as critical perspectives for living in the wake of violence."" -- Casey Golomski * American Historical Review * ""The volume Riotous Deathscapes is an experience; trying to review it is akin to describing a meal or experience, a war zone or a love affair, in words. . . . I want to thank Hugo Canham for this language—a delicate corporeal recognition of touch, membranes, exchange of molecules and language, maybe conquest, assault, a mugging or perhaps a love affair, as a theory-method for re-visioning a world of deep, tragic, unpredictable, and often joyful interdependencies."" -- Michelle Fine * South African Journal of Psychology *

Author Information

Hugo ka Canham is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand and coeditor of Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience.

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