Our affirmation is a crime against property---it defies pre-set academic expectations of who “owns” political thought to create new spaces of “black livingness.” Thus, intellectual fugitivity is a means of being in but not of the university, a means by which debaters disrupt racial domination through alternative studies despite constraints.

Fugitive (Im)possibilities: Flight, freedom, and the Black Radical Tradition

History shows that slavery is incomplete and struggle against enslavement and capture is constant. The historical traces of fugitive mobility in the Atlantic world suggest a more complicated and contested vision of the plantation system than is represented in colonial and national archives or in cartographic renderings of the landscape. Closer reading of the archives, as we do in analysis of Ann Clark’s advertisement above, reveals that absconding—to visit a lover or family member, escape punishment, or attempt to permanently leave the condition of enslavement—was widespread. As Dunnvant et al. (this issue) show, plantocratic map-makers often misrendered territories under settler control to downplay the presence of maroons at the plantation’s borders. Flight was one of many modes of resistance scholars have documented: in the western and eastern Atlantic worlds, people rose up against their captors in West African barracoons, mutinied or jumped ship, revolted against plantation masters and colonial governments. Attention to both sides of the Atlantic is particularly important because the “Atlantic world” has tended to signify the Americas and Caribbean, a framing that elides the histories of resistance across the African continent and linkages between “Old World” and “New World” geographies.

The will to fugitivity in the face of systems of enslavement informs what Cedric Robinson names the Black Radical Tradition, a tradition very much alive in fugitive geographies today. Robinson argues that a central tenet of the Black Radical Tradition is a sense of history and political agency, a “collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” (1983: 170-171). As George Lipsitz explains, this collective consciousness “reminds us not to confuse the grandiose aspirations and illusions of the powerful with the actual lived experiences of those they control. Slavery did mandate legally and militarily supported social death, but slaves worked assiduously and effectively each day, every day, each year, and every year to create a rich social life… Domination produces resistance, and resistance plants the seeds of a new society within the shell of the old” (Lipsitz, 2017: 109). The “ontological totality” at the heart of the Black Radical Tradition consists of innumerable instances of actually-existing social life where projects of social death have sought to render it impossible.

Thus, fugitivity is a spatial method of contesting geographies of domination through mobility, collective struggle, and what Katherine McKittrick calls “Black livingness” (McKittrick 2021). Fugitivity is a method rooted in the experiences of African, African descended, and Indigenous peoples as they struggle(d) against dispossession and dehumanization wrought by colonial and capitalist enclosures and foreclosures. The plantation is only one instantiation of racist spatial and economic ordering (McKittrick 2011: 949). And while there is not an unbroken line from the plantation’s emergence in the colonial commodity market system to the neoliberal present, its afterlives reverberate through diverse racial-spatial projects today, including underdevelopment, mass incarceration, urban abandonment, ecological destruction, resource extraction, and border proliferation. At the same time, following Cedric Robinson, resistance to slavery “gave lie to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of oppression and exploitation” (1997: 11). The ongoingness of fugitive practices exposes the lie of uncontested and uncontestable systems of oppression past and present. This insight—that fugitivity disrupts the stability of racial domination— has implications for how we study geography. As McKittrick cautions, work that maps only racial violence can elide or erode a Black sense of place, whereby “life, violence, encounter, and coloniality, together, point to practical strategies of resistance” in spaces shaped by struggle (2011: 953). Fugitivity as method offers alternative cartographic sensibilities that are attuned to the spatial practices of Black and other marginalized people within and against mainstream geography.

Finally, if fugitivity challenges essentialist narratives and cartographies of oppression (Madera, 2015), it also challenges the liberal concept of freedom that defines it as a metaphysical state. As Orlando Patterson argued decades ago, if the slave has the most precise understanding of freedom, her fugitive movements point toward its contingency. This insight is central to Neil Roberts’s analysis of “freedom as marronage.” Roberts reads marronage beyond the historical geography of the maroons and suggests how marronage as a will to freedom instantiates a challenge to liberal political thought and practice. Crucially, if for Roberts flight sometimes means freedom and sometimes means the movement toward freedom, for us such a distinction is precisely the motivation to understand fugitivity as method. For the fugitive person, escape did not bring about the end of commodification and oppression. Rather, as a “crime against property,” fugitivity rendered the person who stole herself away a criminal, looking over her shoulder as one both under the law and beyond its protection. This contradiction is at the heart of Rinaldo Walcott’s (2018) critique of recent political theorizations that represent fugitivity as a signifier of freedom. For Walcott, the conditions of unfreedom that give rise to flight means that fugitivity can never be synonymous with freedom, but rather with “freedom’s violence” (Walcott 2018: 156). As freedom’s violence, fugitivity gestures to the not-yet status of freedom, a status that persisted even after the formal abolition of slavery. While Walcott reads this as the failure of fugitivity to constitute meaningful political practice in the face of totalizing racial violence, we take a different tack. Fugitivity is not a discrete, linear movement from unfreedom to freedom—an impossibility for those positioned outside of dominant human geographies. Instead, fugitivity performs freedom as “a constant struggle,” one in which Black, Indigenous, and other racialized, gendered, and poor people have, in the words of the Civil Rights hymn, cried, moaned, sought, and died for “so long/ we must be free, we must be free” (attributed to R. Slavitt, cited in Davis, 2016).

Fugitive Methods: Making Knowledge, Kin, and Freedom

The historical and present-day practices of fugitivity by Black and other racialized people should not be read as reactions to socio-spatial domination but as place-making otherwise. Fugitivity is generative: it enacts or rehearses alternative politics, social relations, and forms of cultural expression to project Black lives and Black spaces beyond the necropolitical logics of dominant geography. In this special issue, we offer three ways that fugitivity as method constitutes alternative, and potentially affirmative, social, spatial, and temporal relations.

Knowledge-making

Fugitivity as method brings an explicitly spatial analytic to Harney and Moten’s (2013) imperative for “Black study.” Where historical fugitivity assembled communities to work against containment in the plantation or colony, Black study invites collectives to work against the disciplinary enclosures of the university or formal centers of knowledge production. It refuses “becoming disciplined” and rejects the offer of recognition from “an institution incapable of loving them” (R. Kelley, 2018: 154). In fact, Black study is about becoming undisciplined: crossing boundaries to think more capaciously about life and death in the wake of colonialism and enslavement and to mobilize tools to enact freedom.

The collective nature of Black study clashes with the competitive, proprietary individualism of the university. By becoming undisciplined together, Black study returns education to its etymological roots: “ex + ducere, or leading out of or away from… the university’s dehumanist perspectives” (Snaza & Singh, 2021: 3). The special issue exemplifies an effort at engaging with Black study. As a group of sociologists, geographers, archeologists, migration, and literature scholars, we practiced being undisciplined in order to share what we know about the operations and failures of the plantation and the colony, the neoliberal carceral state, and the border regime. Plotting together, we assembled an archive of ways that people evade(d) dominant spatial patterns through flight and fight, cooperation and refusal, and through material (socio-ecological) and imaginative work. This fugitive archive represents the heritage of Black life in geographies of violence, preserving and proposing lively possibilities for/in/of the future.

Kin-making

Neither wholly outside nor wholly inside the university, Black study exemplifies the extent to which fugitivity is praxiological rather than ideological. Put differently, fugitivity is not a pure, ethical stance. Instead, it is a method by which real people refuse the logics of their own dehumanization and aspire to freedom despite tremendous legal, material, and social constraints. Maroon communities in Jamaica, for example, agreed to refuse safe harbor to future runaways in exchange for British recognition of their autonomy. On the ground, though, as we see in the advertisement above, those communities (or individual members of those communities) sometimes pursued or facilitated fugitive relations against the very colonial state with which they had entered treaties. Rather than embrace the “ruse of freedom,” whereby the offer of sovereignty is predicated on the subjection of others, they maneuvered strategically to create porous spaces of refuge and improvisational arrangements of belonging (Lloyd, 2020: 79). Sometimes the practical strategies of the fugitive took martial and spectacular forms, as in the case of the Kisama armies of Portuguese Angola or Akulu warriors of Suriname (among many others).