Review of Maroon Choreography by fahima ife (Duke University Press)

In Maroon Choreography, fahima ife follows the policing of Black and Indigenous life across Western modernity in a series of meditations on the “discipling” of the English language in literature and pedagogy, asking us to consider how the afterlife or afterlives of slavery and the present reality of coloniality echoes in our more closely held assumptions about the relationship between language and power. Each of the book’s four sections meditates on a particular aspect of these contradictions, unpacking how certain intellectual projects and submerged knowledges cannot be understood in “disciplined English.” These stylistic choices function on both a creative and critical level, leaving us with a text that will challenge a wide range of audiences across the humanities and be instructive in our classrooms and workshops.