Review
“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
“It is not often that an academic text takes you on a journey. fahima ife’s book of essays and poetry, Maroon Choreography, invites us to theorize not by defining and analyzing but rather by inhabiting an undocumented past of escape from slavery that links to present-day escapes from slavery’s afterlife. In this process of imagining, the text engages with an important conversation within Black studies, critical theory, and performance studies.”―Omar Ricks, Dance Chronicle
"Maroon Choreography . . . inspires as possibility for what poetry might be, how it might bring forth homage and critical theory about Blackness in new forms and fresh ways of thought. It disassembles. I’m drawn to books of all sorts that unravel dominant discourses that plague our imaginations, and ife does that."―Dawn Lundy Martin, Brooklyn Poets
"Maroon Choreography . . . . [is] a radical work that emerges from centuries of the informal, from the pneumatic symphony of all of us, but specifically of Blackness, 'in the slickness of joy,' and takes to the snake with great force. ife proposes questions that are rarely asked, perspectives refusing popular thought. They invite us to sit with them, to float, ascend, transcend, practice, to move through something not written by the choreography of coloniality — and to breathe 'in the upper air unseen.'"―Cameron Lovejoy, Fugue
About the Author
fahima ife is Associate Professor of Black Aesthetics and Poetics, and Director of the Black Studies minor in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.
