Daniel Ìgbín'bí Coleman's Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Indigenous and Black Life Across the Americas is a nuanced and transformative exploration of the decolonial practices and movements that inform how Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous peoples of all genders together forge and navigate worlds that exceed the restrictive logics of coloniality within the Western hemisphere. The book's central intervention is to track how Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous artists, activists, and other cultural producers creatively refuse the gendered and racialized violence of the “one‐world world” order (OWW) (Law 2015), or the totalizing world order that is structured by modern/colonial global neoliberal capitalism (3). To accomplish this, Coleman builds on the work of decolonial thinkers such as Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018) and Gustavo Esteva and Arturo Escobar (2017) and turns to the conceptual framework of the “pluriverse,” which Coleman understands as the plural and nuanced cosmologies of “being/becoming” and “thinking/doing” that Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous peoples create and practice to explore their lived political, cultural, historical, and spiritual entanglements while also attending to their asymmetrical experiences.This turn to the space‐time of the pluriverse to study Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous creative reinventions and refusals is an innovative move that contrasts with other trans studies scholarship that thinks within the boundaries of the nation‐state or area studies formations of region, which have remained the field's primary frameworks for studying racialized and gendered world‐making practices. Instead, a turn to the pluriverse enables Coleman to focalize and bring together two alternative South‐South geographies and space‐times: “Améfrica Ladina” (Magno 1980) and “Abya Yala South” (Keme 2018; Walsh 2017). These two terms, coined by Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous thinkers across the Western Hemisphere, center the entanglements between the knowledge formations and practices of these communities. By bringing these two frameworks together to connect and work across multiple insurgent Souths exceeding national borders or regions, Coleman's pluriversal project ultimately bridges the worlds of those whose full existences have been historically foreclosed by the OWW.Part of what makes Refusals and Reinventions such a particularly rich and compelling study is Coleman's impressive practice‐based and interdisciplinary training as a performance artist and dancer, a performance studies scholar, and a Lukumí priest, which deeply informs his analysis of artistic production and movement practices and the pluriversal spiritual transformations they engender. Coleman's extensive experience of living and working in artistic and political community with the artists, political organizers, and thinkers whom he centers throughout Refusals and Reinventions further textures his writing. He narrates these embodied experiences and overlapping lineages using the frameworks of Black, trans, and decolonial feminist studies to demonstrate “how creative insurgent political work, through its poetic provocations and doing, creates worlds, sustain worlds, and provides access to those very worlds, despite the dominant order's ongoing attempts at assimilating, subsuming, and eradicating our peoples, our cosmologies, and our entire ways of existence—our worlds” (7). For Coleman, the expressions of creative insurgency that occur through performance art, political demonstrations, and mutual aid exemplify transgressive ways of accessing our humanity that refuse to reproduce the OWW's hierarchies of superiority.Researched across a five‐year period (2014–19), the book is divided into four case studies in Chiapas, Mexico, and Greensboro, North Carolina—the two primary pluriversal spaces where Coleman worked and lived during this period—and each chapter examines a creative political insurgency movement in which Coleman participated. Coleman's first chapter, “A Full‐Dignified‐Just Life: Insurgent Grief,” unfolds in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, where we witness how histories of racialized and gendered violence transform the ways that we see, know, and perform expressions of mourning. In response to the gender‐based violence of femicide/feminicide that haunts the region, Coleman performed a public walking practice that transformed his mixed‐race and trans body into a portal for channeling the collective grief of losing loved ones to the OWW's persistent feminization and eradication of Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous bodies, regardless of gender, through colonial violence.The second chapter, “The Wake Work of M/otherhood,” shifts our attention to Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, to listen to insurgent pluriversal rewritings of racialized motherhood through the Black Mama's Day Bail Outs, an abolitionist initiative to bail out incarcerated Black women and caregivers. Following Black queer feminist thought, Coleman reads the Bail Outs movement as a form of “wake work” that represents the ongoing rejection of the OWW's racist foundations by “refusing the continuation of abjection and nonontology for Black women, mothers, and caregivers and, by extension, Black people” (83). By challenging how carceral logics persistently seize Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous mothers as the OWW's capital, the Bail Out movement instead invokes the pluriversal worlds and practices of valuation that have always revered these women as maternal figures.Coleman then guides us into the Elsewhere Living Museum in Greensboro to witness the transfeminist performance art and decolonial pedagogical work of the performance artist Lia García in the next chapter, “Into the Trans Break.” Inspired by García's performance Cocinar la memoria, which narrates racialized trans trauma through a presentation of broken household items, Coleman utilizes the metaphor of “brokenness” as a trans pedagogical tool for exploring the ways Black and Native/Indigenous peoples can reconstruct ontologies that exceed the anthropocentric and Euro‐ethnocentric focus of the OWW. Rather than fixing the fragmented image of the human, a “trans break” points us to the racialized ecological and spiritual cosmologies that expand beyond colonial expectations of being/becoming.We return to Mexico and even cross the Atlantic Ocean in the fourth case study, “Shoal Ecopoetics and Otroas.” Here Coleman examines the racial and queer logics of Squadron 421, a Zapatista maritime unit comprising men, women, and an otroa member who together embarked on a “reverse colonization” journey by sailing from Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico, to the port of Vigo, Galicia, Spain.1 Their voyage aimed to rename the land and denounce the violence and extraction of colonialism. Drawing inspiration from the Black feminist theorist Tiffany King's groundbreaking framework of the “shoal,” Coleman reads Squadron 421’s voyage along colonized land and sea as a queer refusal to separate the histories that inform Blackness and Indigeneity.Coleman's coda, “Tuning in to the Wood Wide Web,” meditates on his journey of finding and witnessing the “Underground Railroad Tree” situated on the campus of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Coleman regards the Underground Railroad Tree as an arboreal ancestor that asks us to witness the breadth of colonial violence alongside it; despite bearing a name that focuses on the violence of chattel slavery, as Coleman notes, the tree undoubtedly bore witness to the displacement and genocide of the Native/Indigenous communities that once stewarded the land. In the presence of this nonhuman ancestor, Coleman recognizes the tree as a site where “the life of this tree and the life of historical trajectories of our species become bound up with one another in the same ecology,” underscoring their pluriversal imbrications (148).Refusals and Reinventions is a crucial text that will be transformative for graduate students and researchers across fields—trans studies, performance studies, critical ethnic studies, and well beyond—who are seeking to engage in decolonial and pluriversal orientations to scholarship. By working across movements of political and creative insurgency, Coleman's case studies intimately demonstrate that artistic production and movement practices are vital and active modes of unlearning colonial logics and relearning what it means to persist within and beyond the OWW. Coleman's movement across geographies, social movements, and the numerous racial, gendered, sexual, spiritual, and linguistic realities they index makes way for other decolonial scholars to forge their own pluriversal connections between distinct yet overlapping cosmologies. Ultimately, in its situated and deeply nuanced attention to Black/Afro‐descendant and Native/Indigenous cosmologies and creative insurgencies, Refusals and Reinventions unleashes its own transformative force to interrupt colonial hierarchies, connect us to past and ongoing insurgency practices, and reinvigorate our capacity to live in and among a pluriversal network of worlds.
Xavier Rashaad Williams (Sun,) studied this question.