So Krug pads her book: chapters are given murky but fashionably prolix titles such as “Social Dismemberment, Social (Re)membering: Obeah Idioms, Kromanti Identities, and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Memory, c. 1675-Present.” Postmodernist buzzwords and buzz-phrases abound: “praxis,” “bodies,” “imbrication,” “subjectivities,” “masculinities,” “reputational geographies,” “subaltern,” “interrogation,” “coloniality,” “discursive mobilization,” “gendered topographies of labor.” In order to make sense out of the book’s maps, you have to turn them upside-down or sideways, because Krug believes that conventional north-oriented cartography is unacceptably Eurocentric, reinforcing “the relationships of power that brought millions of Africans across the ocean in chains.” Sentences go on and on. A sample: “If the fundamental unit of being is not the liberal subject—the atomic individual with rights and obligations ensured by the legal apparatus of state—but rather a collective self, fashioned through the instrumental deployment of historical memory and rituo-political choreography, then, unsurprisingly, biography must function differently.”
Allen makes the point that Krug's deception was enabled by academic fashions, but it's also probably true that academics are particularly susceptible to confusing stereotypes -- which Krug exploited on a massive scale -- with communities. And in such an atmosphere, you can indeed pass off as yourself what is in fact just an "instrumental deployment" of "rituo-political choreography".
