RIOTOUS DEATHSCAPES

269pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2023

First published in the USA in 2023.

“This is, quite simply, one of the most remarkable books I have read in a long time. Written in anger, despair, and disenchantment, this book is nonetheless about hope. From the spectacularly scenic but stunningly poor South African region of Mpondoland, Hugo Canham finds what he calls Mpondo theory, a body of knowledge that eschews capitalist notions of ownership and instead favors communal, environmentally conscious uses of the land and the ocean. If South Africa has been waiting for the postapartheid text par excellence, the sad, powerful, and insightful Riotous Deathscapes could well be that text.” Jacob Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police

“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.” Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and being

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