A Fugitive's Reflections
Last month was the launch of our Fugitive Handbook, a four-piece roundtable using fugitivity as a mobilizing praxis to theorize Black diasporic resistance. The response to the handbook has been both exciting and illuminating. Social media is both ephemeral and lasting, as such, we wanted to chart the public response, and archive the discussion surrounding the #FugitiveHandbook, most particularly, the thoughtful engagement by participants of the The MSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab (#DHReads20). This post serves as a palimpsest. We seek to archive these discussions using them as a point of departure to define and engage with questions of fugitivity, and how its attending theories, shape our digital humanist practices.
The Rules
R1. How do you escape? brings to light the carceral culture.
R2. How do you steal? Questions the hegemonic position of the Judeo-Christian moral code.
R3. How does it feel like? Is rather Dionysian, the Weberian work ethic is dismantled.
R4. Whatever. Fuck deadlines
@arungapatchka
Form
the line between ‘article’ and ‘online resource’ was so interestingly blurred.
@motolibrarian
there are increasingly more and more spaces that blend these genres, but many are walled off within certain fields/praxes. EM seems to transcend these limitations through its open and experimental design!
@CLBOYLES
Actions:
a) To blur
b) To blend
c) To transcend
The fugitive is liminal. And is decidedly undetectable.
Tina Campt reminds us that we must always define our terms. We speak of fugitivity within the tradition of Black theorists:
Marquis Bey - Traniflesh, Black womanhood’s ungendeered flesh begets a radical opening to engage in subversive world building [1]
Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez – Worlds/otherwise, within the rupture, Afro-atlantic imaginations of the fantastic and the spectacular create and refashion new worlds[2].
“In the shadow, where slaves gathered out of sight to plot their next act of life and resistance, black life transgressed slave codes and exceeded the register.[5]”
Tina Campt – The quiet and the quotidian, an everyday and durable, practice of refusal and resistance[3].
Fred Moten – Fugitive movement, a Black refusal to be refused[4].
Electric.Marronage invokes the fugitive. Our digital space is a locus for the (im)possible. It is a digital playground for creating worlds/otherwise. A new world order, a worldview, that demands a new conception of the human and humanity.[6] We are world-making through epistemes of black feminist theory. In form, Electric.Marronage encourages hybridity, fluidity, and liminality—our practice is multidimensional as it challenges and defies time and space, and moves between disciplines, communities, and institutions.[7] This challenge demands a practice that, like fugitive maroons, unrelentingly resists sites of enclosure.
There is a velocity, an unnamed electricity that exists within the rupture, that is charging us forward. Fugitivity is coded and encoded in vibrational energy that registers sonically. The fugitive is quiet, but never mute.[8] To be attentive to Fugitivity’s character, and its many registers, requires a method that is multi-modal. Deploying varied mediums is a fugitive practice, a refusal to the prescribed ordering of things.
The Fugitive Handbook embodied the underpinning black feminist frameworks of Electric.Marronage. We refuse the confinements of the academe that require the meritocracy, professionalism, and strict disciplinary bounds. We remain accountable to the kitchen table.[9] The electricians are digital curators of a New World View, by blurring, blending and transcending modes of scholarship and strictures of disciplines, we are demanding that Black and Brown women be read differently. And we will be read on our own terms.
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby
[1] Bey, Marquis. 2019. “Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered.” Black Scholar 49 (1): 55-63.
[2] Figueroa-Vasquez, Yomaira, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, Northwestern University Press (forthcoming).
[3] Campt, Tina “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity,” Art & Education video, September 10, 2017. https://www.artandeducation.net/classroom/video/153814/tina-campt-black-feminist-futures-and-the-practice-of-fugitivity
[4] Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 177–218.
[5] Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Xroads Praxis: Black Diasporic Technologies for Remaking the New World.” Sx Archipelagos, no. 3 (July 9, 2019).
[6] Figueroa-Vasquez, Yomaira, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
[7] Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Xroads Praxis”
[8] Campt, Tina, Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity
[9] Smith, Barbara "A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press," in Communication at the Crossroads: The Gender Gap Connection, ed. Ramona R. Rush and Donna Allen (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1989), 202–3.