Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance

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.