Hugo ka Canham. Riotous Deathscapes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. x + 269 pp. Notes. References. Index. $26.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781478019596.

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