"Exorbitance draws on legacies of the Caribbean to examine how the concept of inheritance attunes us to forms of autonomy and interdependence that circulate in and around statements of sovereignty. Deborah A. Thomas places sovereignty beyond the state and parameters of institutions, positioning it instead as practices, performances, and processes that refuse law and dominion and draw attention to alternative genealogies of governance, community, and ceremony. Using the Caribbean region as a case study, she demonstrates how bodily knowledge influences theories and actions of sovereignty. Foregrounding embodied methods and insights to envision a more radical humanist anthropology, Thomas argues that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also the means to refuse and retool them"-- Provided by publisher.
In Exorbitance, Deborah A. Thomas calls for new approaches to political sovereignty grounded in the embodied forms of autonomy and relation created in daily life. Rather than rooting sovereignty in the violence of the state and its institutions, Thomas conceives of sovereignty as the embodied refusal of law and dominion. Drawing on the insights of Caribbeanist thought and studies of Jamaican social, political, and spiritual life, Thomas proposes an exorbitant sovereignty enacted through a phenomenological notion of inheritance. Such a sovereignty emerges from alternative genealogies of governance, community, and ceremony that exceed Enlightenment expectations of political life. Thomas contends that the articulations of exorbitant sovereignty are emergent, ephemeral, and ultimately, relational. By outlining the perils and promises of our inheritance of colonial logics and the tools to refuse them, Thomas models a collaborative and collective anthropology oriented toward improvisational experimentation rather than ethnographic extraction.
Deborah A. Thomas calls for new approaches to political sovereignty grounded in the embodied forms of autonomy and relation created in daily life rather than the state.
