Autochthonomies

The four consecutive consonants in "autochthonous" are difficult to pronounce; they lodge in one's throat and produce a choking effect.The neologism in the title of this book by Myriam J.A. Chancy embraces that difficulty.With it, Chancy "tries her tongue" in a similar fashion to the way poet M. NourbeSe Philip wreaks havoc on the English language.Where Philip breaks apart words to unearth legacies of slavery and colonialism, Chancy augments the Ancient Greek words autós ("self") and khthṓn ("earth," "soil," or "land") into an expression of an autonomy that is particular to the African diaspora.Thoroughly ambitious, philosophically rich, and rigorously interdisciplinary, Autochthonomies is a worthwhile read for students of Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism.Chancy aims at cultivating a reading practice founded in the intramural dimensions of the African diaspora."That people of African descent can understand one another and 'read' each other's cultural productions beyond and within postcolonial pasts/presents is often neglected in order to insist on the nonessentializing nature of racialization," she contends (p. 6).Describing this particular capacity as a kind of "reading" enables her to establish an intimacy between texts from different corners of the Black world that reflects the broader continuities and disjunctures of the African diaspora.Each chapter gathers disparate literary works, cultural objects, and artistic forms to create unlikely "intra-diasporic" combinations.Rather than promote a new model for thinking about transnational articulations of Black culture, Chancy focuses her energies on the unending phenomenon in which the serial ruptures triggered by the Middle Passage "gave birth to rearticulations of what it meant to be African on new ground" (p.14).This "new ground" is no empty territory to be claimed but, instead, a virtual terrain that takes shape in the realm of cultural expression.Chancy refers to this geographically unfixed site of continuous habitation as a "lakou/yard consciousness," an allusion to the informal zones of sociality found across the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean.From the outset, it is clear that this book is far from a conventional study of African diasporic cultures.Part of the University of Illinois Press's "New Black Studies" series edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride, Autochthonomies furthers the editors' call for innovative advances in the field.Contributing to this, the book's argument actually functions more like an invitation to readers to partake in what Chancy describes as an "interpretative journey."This and the project's overall unruly approach calls for an active reader

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Diaspora · Indigenous · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transnationalism · Zulu · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies