Volume 22, Number 5, 2023 Special Issue: Fugitivity as Method

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Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehumanization have mapped a historical and spatial archipelago of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles across the Caribbean and the Americas. Narratives of fugitivity recuperate the diverse and widespread practices of resistance and refusal that have always accompanied racial violence in these geographies. While scholars have demonstrated the ongoing-ness of racial violence from the plantation to the present, studies on fugitivity remain largely confined to the historical period of chattel slavery, having the unintended effect of rendering plantation futures hegemonic in the present. In addition, the majority of studies have confined analysis to the “New World” despite the prevalence of fugitive practices in other spaces of colonial and racial capitalist domination. Rooted in Black geographies, this special issue asks what fugitivity—as a historical phenomenon, analytical category, and political practice—adds to our understanding of the production of space and subjects today. As a method, fugitivity travels across disciplinary boundaries and multiple spacetimes, charting the entanglements of geographies of racial violence and the freedom practices of racialized people. The articles in the special issue are unified by a concern for how fugitivity, as a method of knowledge-making, kin-making, and place-making, elude the enclosure of traditional politics and how collective, rather than individual, resistances forge alternative spaces in excess but never fully outside of dominant geographies.

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This paper seeks to refine scholarly thinking regarding invasive species and decolonial politics in plantation ecologies by following bamboo’s contradictory relationships to various parties on the island of Jamaica. Planters imported bamboo to Jamaica for its remarkable propensity to grow, a quality that soon let it loose on the island’s hinterlands. There, bamboo allied with a people whose flight mirrored its own: Maroons, or fugitive African and Indigenous Taino people who built autonomous communities in the island’s interior. Lately, bamboo is on the move again, precipitating an ecological “invasion” in the eyes of the island’s conservationists and an opportunity for green growth from the perspective of its business interests. These parties, though differing in many ways, both approach bamboo through an idiom of mastery with roots in the plantation and colonial forestry. Maroons, on the other hand, model a creative openness to more-than-human encounters, building relationships to bamboo that are both quotidian and sacred, salutary and trying, but which point toward Maroon autonomy. I offer the concept of fugitive ecologies to attune scholars to these patchy geographies of partial freedom Maroons build with this “invasive” collaborator at the plantation’s edges. Whereas existing paradigms within the environmental humanities tend to focus on species-level classification, fugitive ecologies allow us to see how plants and animals—native, invasive, or otherwise—can “become with” Black freedom struggles.

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Formal spatial modeling and analytical approaches to maroon settlement, fugitivity, and warfare in the colonial-era Caribbean have tended to mine historical cartographic sources instrumentally to analyze the distributions and simulate processes driving marronage in St. Croix (Dunnavant 2021b; Ejstrud 2008; Norton and Espenshade, 2007). Through close-in analysis, we compare two Danish maps of St. Croix produced in 1750 and 1799 in relation to modern cartographic sources, to explore how cartographic forms and cartesian conventions (attempt to) elide blind spots in the colonial gaze. By modeling possible subject-oriented maroon movement on georeferenced colonial maps and contemporary LiDAR, we demonstrate how GIS can recover anti-colonial agency. Additionally, the practice of georeferencing itself is a critical site of analysis, revealing distortions suggestive of social and environmental conditions that limited colonial cartographers’ ability to map certain wilderness and contested landscapes that lay outside of their control.

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This paper historicizes the riotous geographies of British Blackness by focusing on three so-called “riots” in London’s post-World War II development, the 1958 Notting Hill uprisings, the 1981 Brixton uprisings and the 2011 pan-London uprisings. Mobilizing debates in Black (British) Geographies, I challenge state narrations of these events as illegitimate expressions of Black Britons’ political discontent. Based on archival research, I expose such framings as ongoing attempts of whiteness to render Black British geographies “ungeographic” within a supposed white British geography. Employing fugitivity as method, I show how these riotous events constituted possibilities for escaping racialized spatio-political categories of British state geographies. I consider British Blackness as political category and as a historically contingent discursive construction that mobilizes people from the African diaspora in specific ways but also stretches beyond them. Thus, I ask: How does Blackness continue to escape attempts of capturing it in and through British state geographies and in what ways does this escape constitute a transfiguration of Black British (un)geographies? The three historical cases I examine exemplify the struggles between the state’s efforts to enclose and exclude Black Britons and their efforts to forge an underground of British Blackness in the wake of Empire.

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This article tells the stories of illegalized migrant people moving through two violent, transcontinental borderscapes: the EurAfrican border that spans Western Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, and pushes further south each year across Africa; and the American border that stretches from the interior of the United States, through Mexico and Central America, and into South America and the Caribbean. Comparative analysis of these borderscapes reveals similar logics, practices, and policies of border enforcement, as well as strategies that migrant people use to subvert them. We argue that fugitivity provides a critical lens for understanding the co-constitution of borders and border transgression, and reveals how the border manufactures its objects—producing fugitive subjects, spaces, and relations across expanding spatial and temporal distances. As a lens rooted in histories of racialized control over human mobility, fugitivity allows us to chart contemporary territorializations of racial domination through bordering alongside constant challenges to these territorializations through movement. Ultimately, fugitivity provides a method that not only maps out the violence and failures of bordering, but one that imagines alternative geographies emanating from the underground of marginalized people, spaces, and relationships.

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This article reads several works of African American literature that depict the urban roofscape as a site of contemporary fugitive praxis, made in and against the enclosures of 20th century urban space. The forms of freedom rehearsed on the roof are intersecting, overlapping and, at times, contradictory. Ultimately, I argue that the roofscape offers an analytic object through which to explore the thorny questions of property, gender, enclosure, and mobility—questions that enrich and complicate the study of fugitive geographies and their use as models for escaping and living outside of the violent enclosures of gendered racial capitalism. The multivalence of the rooftop provides an opportunity to dwell with the complex questions of fugitive method: What forms do geographies of fugitivity take? Who do they limit or enable? And under what conditions? How do fugitive geographies both sustain and break from the social, political, and economic relations from which their producers flee?

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As a Black Studies concept that traces the circumstances of (non)freedom of Black subjects, fugitivity is, in essence, an escaping or evasion of oppressive systems and structures. In Black Studies, fugitivity embodies the dual process of resistance and resilience of Black subjects who seek liberation from racism and systemic injustice and of reclaiming and exercising agency and autonomy in a world that constantly marginalizes and subjugates. In exploring the concept of fugitivity and its implications for the liberation of Black subjects, it becomes crucial to consider whether and if fugitivity serves as a position, a process, or a relation from which Black individuals and communities can bring about repair as complete liberation.