Black Undertow

Hugo ka Canham

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478034377
  9781478033479
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062936

Meditative and theoretical, Black Undertow reorients the thinking of blackness away from the Atlantic to the African shorelines of the Indian Ocean, places where queerness and black life frequently brush up against one another. Hugo ka Canham listens for what he names the buzz of the undertow, the traces of African ancestors who linger in water, sand, coastal forts, corals, ritual practices, and unruly imaginations along the shore. In tracking these elusive figures, he develops an approach that honors a queer right to opacity, reconstituting the siloed disciplinarity that imagines African studies, Black studies, Queer African studies, and Queer studies as necessarily different. When read as coconstitutive instead, Canham demonstrates that they better allow for explicating local life, history, poetics, and theory. In so doing, he forges methods of studying black life that think beyond the limits of traditional, textual archives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Black Undertow
• Introduction
• 1. Afro-Coral Walls
• 2. Queer Waters
• 3. Water’s Filicidal Specters
• 4. Ritual Gathering
• 5. Aquatic Graves
• Conclusion. Queer Openings
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index