Abstract
With dignity and grace, mystery and presence, Professor Canham stood at the lectern in the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Lecture Hall at the University of South Africa in August 2023, and bared his brilliant, bold, and delicate intellect-heart-nervous system to the audience:
“I have a strange habit,” he confessed. “Every morning when I wake, I try to account for the number of dead Africans in the sea. Migrants seeking freedom.” (Excuse my paraphrased recollection jotted down in awe.)
Of course he does. Professor Canham is an exquisite chronicler of small and intimate drops of Black pain and desire, theorizing global tremors visible to the attuned eye-heart, within these seemingly small and always ignored sea-level facts.
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 write with humility and with Canham, a kind of jazz. Global North and South, friends for decades, searching for poetry/theory to capture the grotesque and sometimes hilarious magic we witness in our hugely different spaces for worlding, often with young people exiled to the margins, dancing and speaking in tongues.
Hugo Ka Canham writes on Mpondoland, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, as a multigenerational, more than human landscape of death, and life; of raw abuse and laughter; a community “skipped over” by modernity and decimated by the violence of neoliberal abandonment. To review is impossible but let me try. And thank you Hugo for asking.
Centrifugal accountabilities: writing and theorizing through local intimacies circulating out through the Black subjugated world
“My mother is present throughout this book,” Dr Canham writes, admitting “I have not written about home or emaMpondwein in prior scholarship.” Canham signals that scholarship borne of head only, toppled above canonical literatures that came before, shorn of affect, is a carcass, a distortion, dissociated, and of course dangerous.
A page later we are told, To be relegated to the margins is to be in a state of being perpetually emotionally charged . . . I write this book from the place of catching feelings. From the chip on my prickly body. From the disorientating vortex of repeated catastrophe and joyful paradox that is the black condition. This book is about amaMpondo people of Mpondoland, but it is also about black people who are subjugated throughout the world.
Gathering the pollen of evidence everywhere, Canham draws on “orality, the natural environment, ritual, family and community story-telling and other acts of active remembering and imagining that enable intergenerational sociality and resistance” (p. 5).
Canham reminds us that his “theory-method” begins in hyphens, folds, edges, betweens; refusing to separate variables or categories or hierarchies of being; unwilling to chart a linear path of time/space; resisting the impulse to turn away from the grotesque, dedicated to suturing Black pain and laughter. He conjures a volume that breathes and provokes “a way of seeing, knowing, being and living with and against sedimented devastation.” He invites readers to join him in a method gesture, ukwakumkanya—creating a shadow in order to illuminate, inciting a “multisensorial experience of life and the world . . . displac(ing) imperial emphasis on the visual.”
With language, Canham introduces constructs/analytics most generative for critical scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. “Sea-level analytics” privileges cultural materials and narratives circulating on the ground, floating between sea and shore, mountain and rivers, history and today, global capitalism/neo-liberalism, and his mother waiting at the window for the next attacker. Canham gathers material by “catching feelings,” attuned to his own and others’ affects; migrating between and within bodies, translated into voices/visions/possessions. The text unfolds through what he calls “liberatory leaps” that travel across “multitudinous timescapes/cylindrical epiphenomenal temporalities.” We are reminded that time is always operating then and now, through each and all of us. And with each scene he engages a pluriverse of sources, citing with equal dignity a critical African scholar or Euro-American writer, an elder, an ancestor, a snake, a child, an artist from Mpondo, seeking to “amplify the lives of my protagonists and treat their truth claims with the gravity of theorists” (p. 11).
Affects dangerous and buoyant
Mpondo theory moves through waves of affect, memory, and stories. Canham insists that readers consider what marginality, excess, and debilitation make possible beyond pain: A pressure point for my analysis is to understand what it means to be constituted of multiplicity . . . There is something simultaneously dangerous and buoyant in this capacity for expansiveness . . . The effects of brutality and inequality score our bodies and are debilitating. But our joy is expansive . . . [opening] infinite possibilities for pleasure and the malleability of queerness that comes from being at odds with the world’s norms. (p. 19)
Canham theorizes and writes through an embodied attunement to affect, corporeality and relationality; he knows skin as porous, able to absorb; he knows people, and hills and rivers, as sturdy, and breakable. He knows that oppression weaves with resistance; pain entangles with resilience and that danger and buoyancy rhyme. In the margins, people and nature absorb cruelty and people and nature also re-generate, queer, re-mix, and flaunt the gifts sharpened outside the norm. “After all, everywhere I see black suffering, I am struck by laughter . . . is the explosion of laughter not the sound of freedom?”
Lines of analytic flight: slopes for seeing, knowing, and reading
Drawn to the relentless and irresistible flames of life and desire on a landscape of Black death, Canham organizes the chapters along wild angles for seeing and writing from the ocean’s edge, the schoolhouse, the graveyard, the riverbed, the hallucination, the performative ribbing of boys on a hill, and from the occult. He compels readers to listen for echoes of ancestors, mountains, rivers, castaways, and those beloveds with AIDS, who came home to die.
The introduction sets the theoretical-methodological-epistemic grounds for the work, queering form, evidence, truth, and complicating what’s a protagonist anyway. Chapter 1 flows toward the reader from the edge of the ocean. “It shows how the ocean rubs against the landmass of Mpondoland and how it forces us to grapple with centuries of intimacy between those who arrived by ship and those they found.” Chapter 2 speaks from the rivers, and all that is deposited within, drowning, buried, and floating. “Here we come to understand what it means to be unhumaned but also to be reborn in waters that operate on a queer frequency” (p. 34). Chapter 3 affords readers a rich opportunity to meet young people—dispossessed, possessed, terrified, ambitious, performative, betrayed, hilarious, generous, without hope, rich in imagination. We encounter “adolescents reaching for the supernatural to assert black queer buoyancy and refusal in a school system predicated on capitalism, discipline, anxiety and mournful community surveillance” (p. 35). In Chapter 4, we descend into the graves of the dead, drawing on “sensorial registers to attend to the vibrational frequencies that emit from the deathscape” (p. 35). And in a gesture toward concluding, Chapter 5 “mounts an argument that black survivance and livingness are tied to famished and queer registers of desire and occult practices.”
Each chapter is grounded in sea-level analytics, with toes deep in the water, in history, in rivers, in schools, on mountain tops, at the edge of the sea, at the edge of rationality, in graves, and in the occult, designed to theorize and humanize the deposits of coloniality, racial capitalism, and neoliberal penetrations, even as queer desires refuse to surrender. And the writing laps up to the shores of wherever you are reading, rubbing you into awareness.
A private chat with Hugo about Chapter 3—but you can all listen
Hugo, you know I love the book. But reading it again, now, just after South Africa has taken the bold position of moral leader to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes and potential genocide, the volume spoke even more passionately to me. I got to Chapter 3, and teared up as I read, this chapter is about what the estranged riotous body tells us about the black conditions . . . Adolescent bodies riot in a worlding process which, in Mpondo cosmology, is the emergence of worlds – . . . that enable multiplicity, ambiguity and the ability to talk back . . . they wrestle between life and death. (p. 105)
For the 10 years we have known each other, we have shared the delight of witnessing young people moored in the margins who choose dignity; who dare to speak, act, in excess of convention, even as they carry the burdens, heart breaks, betrayals in their bellies. I, like you, have gathered their stories, brought them home, fed them, written with them/about them, cataloged their wild fantasies and deep despair, their thoughts of family and suicide, their brilliant critique of the institutions that have failed them, their rich weave of mutual aid, their freedom dreams.
You capture these passions with far more poetry and respect than I have mustered, and you move to psychological spaces I have dared not. And so they speak, in tongues. Chicana queer theorist Gloria Anzaldua wrote, almost 50 years ago, “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” You take so seriously, handle so care-fully, cherish what young people say with threatened and bold tongues. You sketch an absolutely beautiful rendering of the young girl, walking naked in the fields maybe indeed pleasuring and being pleasured with another young girl and maybe even a snake. You carry these stories Hugo with grace and elegance; you see and hold young people without romance or judgment as you held your momma that evening in the storm and your brother at the hospital. With dignity.
I love that you write, “Even as I read young people in relation to the state, I imagine the conceptual possibilities invented when one unmoors marginalized rural people from the political narrative of the nation state” (p. 106).
Hugo, this is a lifetime conversation I need to have with you and others in the global South, writing with adolescents when unemployment is high, trust in government low, pay off for college precarious, after the hoped for revolution, and touched by the haunting memories of what older brothers and sisters brought home from their time in the city. You edge me to ask: Am I still too attached to a White/North American mobility narrative; a fantastic belief that away is good, coming home important, political engagement core to consciousness, college will pay off. You write with exquisite particularity even as you induce readers to contest our own unchallenged assumptions/romantic fantasies of mobility.
You ask other questions I have not had the courage to ask: What if youthful refusals to conform are not always necessarily political or even concerned with the successful overturn of a world stacked against them? When I was studying alongside young people who dropped out/were pushed out of high school, I wrote Framing Dropouts (1990) about the racialized sweeps of push outs among low-income youth of color out of high school prior to graduation as a political project of racial capitalism by the state, the creeping carcerality that was extracting Black and Brown youth from communities, with troubling economic consequence. At the time I theorized these massive waves of high school exit as enacting and embodying critical resistance, in the spirit of Learning to Labour (Paul Willis). But that’s not what they said. They narrated their exit in a flattened discourse of self-blame. “I messed up.” No one named capitalism, White supremacy, and a Euro-centric curriculum. But you nudge me to confront: If youth do not articulate a critical consciousness of structural conditions, but speak only through dominant stories of youth-blame, is it academic arrogance or our obligation to theorize that they know—somewhere in their young bodies—that the odds are “stacked against them?” As you noted, young people who cross the lines of convention do indeed expose “mechanisms of coercion” (p. 107) through “sly disobedience.” You argue: “by staying the margins, then, they choose themselves” (p. 108). Perhaps it is precisely our work to connect the breadcrumbs of their refusal with the long tentacles of accumulated oppression and despair, coagulating in their veins and spirits.
Later in the chapter you open a line of analysis about the evacuated body—the shell, carcass, the vacant body in search of being filled by the “real self.” And here I want to wonder with you are these lives actually empty or aggressively stuffed? I have sat with so many young people—particularly girls, queer, and trans youth—who try to flee—in desperate desire to escape structural and intimate violence. They are running from the excessive stuffing of others’ needs/desires/fears and sometimes literal seeds into their bodies. So they “take flight” in drugs, running away, racing into the abusive arms of an older man, or in being “possessed.” My small question asks: Is the carcass/shell really vacant and/or spilling over with traumas/abuse/responsibilities? Let us return, soon, to consider the sweet taste of fugitivity and the wretched after-taste of betrayal.
And then Hugo of course you separate slightly the drapes so we might peek into “queer intimacies” engaged in capture, an embrace of anti-capture. Your vision has no bounds, you see through time, mountains, water, psychosis, punishments, and wounds. And always find a touch of desire. As you write, a queer reading of intimacies that emerge in the hold, the schoolyard, the mining compound, the colonial mission station, the rural homestead and the African prison would understand these bonds and feeling relations as anti-capture, commitment to feeling, pleasure and being in relation. (p. 133)
Canhamian gifts: a theory-method of desire
A call to unstuck, pry open, and leap
Canham calls for sea-level theorization to deepen particularity and at the same time offers something beyond the particular; a provocation. Maxine Greene, long gone North American philosopher, contrasted what she considered anesthetic experiences from aesthetic experiences. She worried that the anesthetic has consumed schools—curriculum, policies, and pedagogies designed to numb children’s sensibilities, flatten their desires, deaden their humanity and empathies, force them to feel none of the pain in the world; to turn away. She worried social science was being deployed as anesthetic to naturalize and medicate the wounds of state and structural violence. Maxine called for aesthetic experiences, with arts, schooling, books, readings, and performance curated as encounters to provoke a wide awakening. For Maxine, and Hugo, it is only in the intimate encounter with the Other that one can unpack, pry open, and leap. As Canham asks, “What openings exist and how do leaps through openings potentially take us out of the imprisoning black history of colonialism?”
Ethics of writing on death as the carpet where life is lived
Canham elegantly navigates ethical dilemmas of binaries, epistemic violence, or damage-centered research. With a triple ethical obligation, he writes to document the violence, expose the wounds, and then trace the filaments of joy/satire/inversion floating in the ruins. A second gift: He refuses to turn away.
Early in the book he speaks of being confronted by a non-choice of “gangrene and amputation,” recounting his brotherly responsibilities to decide over the horrendous wound on his brother’s leg while referencing Baldwin’s 1955/1984 literary address of gangrene versus amputation; a non-choice for Black men. In another moment of wrenching re-presentation of colonial violence he elaborates on cartography when “colonial maps described the Eastern Cape territory as Kaffraria . . . the place of ‘kaffirs’ . . . the Mpondo people counted among those indexed as [subhuman] another variation of fauna.” Canham insists on the public rendering of the grotesque lynched/dehumanized body—as Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, did. Even in the drowning bodies of African men, women, and children lost at sea, Canham saw strokes of freedom.
Queering form
A brief note of appreciation for Canham’s third gift—the form of the volume. In the poetic-theory of Riotous Deathscapes, every editorial move has been deliciously and cleverly queered—how he writes, who he cites, what constitutes evidence, the weaving of history and present, honoring mountains and rivers and graveyards as protagonists, curating poetic theory, appreciating and respecting the visions and voices of girls in school who dare to break the bounds of convention alongside classic, critical, and Black feminist decolonial scholars. In form, undeniably smart and refreshingly queer.
Rubbing
Finally, a word on “rubbing.” Canham uses this language as a seasoning for the book, sprinkled throughout, a nod toward the ways in which the sea rubs along the shores; as words on the text rub against readers’ stubborn and time-worn pre-conceptions; as history rubs the surface, and beneath, of the present. As a gerund, rubbing can be self-soothing, irritating, soft, invited, coerced, or we can be “rubbed the wrong way.” We can rub ourselves, each other, gravestones, rocks, cats, blankets, another’s ache, or we can rub away the dirt/shame. But there is no denying the relationality of the language and what lingers, transformed in the after-rub.
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.
