Keywords
Fugitivity
Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies that captures the physical, metaphysical, armed, and everyday resistance of enslaved Africans and their allies against any and all aspects of enslavement. Rashauna Johnson, describing the “slave space” that was New Orleans, points to the specific geography of the region as lesson in fugitivity: “Nonetheless, enslaved persons appropriated the places assigned them toward their own ends, a point that broadens the received gendered geographies of slave resistance. Because New Orleans was an important port city, it offered a diffuse set of pathways for escape – and recapture. If the politics of place could oppress, slaves reasoned, movement could also become an avenue to freedom. The connectedness that made the city’s location so desirable to merchants and imperial officials – its land passageways, river outlets, and Atlantic access – gave runaways an array of escape options. The fugitives redefined themselves in local “geographies of resistance,” or fled to other parts of the Atlantic World.” (Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis).
However, fugitivity is a term encompassing more than marronage (which is the act of absconding from enslavers and being out of reach of slaveholding authorities, even if temporary). Fugitivity describes active and intentional resistance, as well as the acts of imagination and refusal that Africans and people of African descent engaged in against slaveholders gendered racial capitalistic regime.
Fred Moten writes: “What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.”
Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies and Keywords for Black Louisiana draws on Black studies insights to understand the sources Africans and their descendants appeared in, as well as better interpret the individual and communal acts of resistance.
