Hugo ka Canham. Riotous Deathscapes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. x + 269 pp. Notes. References. Index. $26.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781478019596.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his compelling book, Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham examines how the amaMpondo, a marginalized subgroup of the regionally dominant Xhosa people in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape, find meaning and forge identities amid poverty, violence, and death.Using the isiMpondo method of ukwakumkanya-an isiMpondo term that refers to shielding one's eyes to block the sun and see far-Canham offers a phenomenological study of black life under (post)colonialapartheid conditions that avoids both Afropessimism and triumphant Afropolitanism to introduce "Mpondo theory"-a fresh contribution to Black Studies from Africa, engaging Indigenous and queer theories while challenging and engaging with black-diasporic perspectives from the Caribbean and Global North.Canham argues that Mpondo theory works beyond the gaze to include all sensory ways of knowing and being.Through archival research, interviews, and personal experiences, Riotous Deathscapes disrupts Western ideas of humanity and death, calling for a broader understanding of materiality and black life.What is most innovative about this book is how Canham uses an autoethnographic platform to focus on human experience, black life and death, bringing together Indigenous (native survivance) and black ways of knowing (black livingness).He advocates a framework for understanding decoloniality based on Indigenous ways of thinking across space and time that are "rooted in place" (25), but also "in relation" ( 22) as a path forward "to breach colonial epistemes" (23).His decolonial framework represents an evolution of Indigenous and black epistemologies and highlights intersections of histories of trauma.Canham argues that these terms or states/conditions should not be read as "mutually exclusive" but "could productively be seen as both potentially making and unmaking each other" (22).Mutual engagement and terms of reference that are nonhierarchical and nonextractive work toward the "unenclosed" (14), which Canham offers as a method/way of moving forward across time and space.These new ways and forms of knowledge act as "confluences" (borrowing from Glissant) of experience and history that are found beyond colonial mapping, but where landscape and geography are paramount to identity processes.Canham explains that there are two audiences for the book-the rural public and the scholarly public-and when considered together, they create "spaces of relation" (31).Chapters can be read alone, although a narrative thread builds progressively across the chapters as "each chapter plays with temporality by moving between timescapes" which Canham terms "cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality" (33).Furthermore, each chapter focuses on an ancestral figure who
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.167 | 0.069 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".