event
Hugo ka Canham: Riotous Deathscapes
17 May 2023
VENUE:
HUMA, Seminar Room 4.02, 4th Floor Humanities Building, University Ave, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
See Google Maps for directions
Lunch will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).
Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za
Attending online? Register to join via Zoom: https://uct-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/973
Meeting ID: 973 5849 7788 | Passcode: 935445 (mobile users may be prompted to provide the passcode)
CONTACT INFORMATION:
HUMA Book Launch
Author: Hugo ka Canham (University of South Africa, South Africa)
Introduction: 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.
See the book: Riotous Deathscapes (Duke University Press, 2023).
Read book introduction
Open-access chapters, see licencing details on page.
About the author: Hugo ka Canham is a Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS), University of South Africa (UNISA). 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. His latest book, Riotous Deathscapes is published by Duke University Press and co-published by Wits University Press.