Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance

by Deborah A. Thomas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478061441
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/12/2025
Series:	The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Deborah A. Thomas is R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Llerena Guiu Searle and Kathryn Mariner  ix
Introduction. Sovereign-ing: The Body as Method  1
1. Traces  27
2. Testimonies  78
3. Embodiments  161
Coda. The Labor of Sovereignty  198
Acknowledgments  205
Notes  209
Bibliography  223
Index

Editorial Reviews

“Exorbitance does more than extend Thomas’ ongoing meditation on sovereignty in everyday life; it articulates our investments in self-determination, autonomy, and even the much more elusive freedom from ground zero—the physical body. In sharp prose that vibrates with visceral resonance and cognitive authority, Thomas illuminates how the possibilities embedded in embodied sovereignty might be one of our best strategies for building new, more life-affirming worlds.”
-- Aimee Meredith Cox, author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

“A brilliant meditation from one of our most supple theorists of violence, performance, institutions, post-slavery, and diaspora, Exorbitance calls for vulnerability and renewed attention to how we use bodily knowledge. Deborah Thomas asks scholars to assess how we listen and therefore hear, mis-hear, or ignore the narratives that are presented to us.”
-- Faith Smith, author of Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century

From the Publisher