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Maroon Choreography

by fahima ife

Duke University Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-1-4780-1334-1 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2156-8 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1425-6
Library of Congress Classification PS3609.F35M37 2021

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
fahima ife is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

REVIEWS

“Maroon Choreography reads like liner notes for a dance unwitnessed except by sound, or a dramaturgy for a dance recorded by the mud and roots of trees who would have been the only audience. It is obscure but everywhere. More unknowable than little known. It participates in the important recent critical practice that goes beyond applying or extending theory and instead insists there is something else to perceive and another way to perceive it.”

-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony

“With great erudition and deep musicality, fahima ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have been made to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.”

-- Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur

“ife invokes recent thinkers for whom the inherited rules and categories of what we have learned to call civilization look like acts of Western oppression. Against those categories, with sublimity and verve, ife’s verse raises up a defiant ‘queeribbeanness,’ celebrating ‘unruly contemporary dancers’ and other ‘black bodies” that ‘struggle to name our lives as sovereign, on our own terms.’ Spectacularly allusive in its canny, concise segments, sometimes programmatic but more often simply learned, Ife’s ‘tremulous / antegrammatical’ work invokes ‘the black morning of baldwin / across the river in another country.’”

-- Stephanie Burt New York Times Book Review

"Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of the familiar to practice otherwise. Through breathing, sitting, humming, and pausing with this text I am consistently reminded (as if one could forget) that our compulsory education systems are colonially choreographed. . . . To engage with this book in the field of comparative and international education is to practice asking more of ourselves and our work while making another world possible."

-- Cee Carter Comparative Education Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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