Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham online book talk

Patrick Brian Smith

Book talk and discussion with Hugo ka Canham and respondent Biko Mandela Gray

The Emergent Nonfiction Lab at the University of Warwick welcomes Hugo ka Canham for this talk and discussion on his book Riotous Deathscapes.&quot;﻿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&quot; (Duke University Press). &quot;Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes is a Mpondo theory-method that ‘looks askance,’ ‘crafts rampant dying as a way of living,’ and ‘draws on black and indigenous ways of being and resisting.’ Canham’s work is particular (to Mpondoland and then to other African and global South communities) and it is diasporic; it is a profound vernacular theory of being in an antiblack world&quot; (Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being). <a href="https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default/Colleges/Human-Sciences/Schools,-departments,-centres,-institutes-&amp;-units/Institutes/Institute-for-Social-and-Health-Studies-(ISHS)/Staff-members/Prof-Hugo-Canham" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Hugo Canham </a>is a Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa. His work is located along the fault lines of black studies, African feminism, African queer theorisations and necropolitics. He studies the phenomenology of living at the margins of human value, suffering and death. His work is invested in detonating the binaries between the human and the natural, multispecies world. It may be understood within the transdisciplinary rubric of Black Planetary Studies. <a href="https://artsandsciences.syracuse.edu/people/faculty/gray-biko-mandela/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Biko Mandela Gray</a> is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion, Syracuse University. His work operates at the nexus and interplay between continental philosophy of religion and theories and methods in African American religion. His research is primarily on the connection between race, subjectivity, religion, and embodiment, exploring how these four categories play on one another in the concrete space of human experience. He also is interested in the religious implications of social justice movements. He is currently working on a book project that explores how contemporary racial justice movements, like Blacklivesmatter, demonstrate new ways of theorizing the connection between embodiment, religion, and subjectivity.

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