"Heard he got caught with a (mm-m)." These are the lyrics to ScarLip's "No Statements" (in the player above). In the song, the Bronx femcee emphasizes that she and her peoples don't participate in aiding the prison industrial complex to capture more Brown and Black folx. Scarlip's everyday defiance and commitment to thwarting racist surveillance will be our theme song for our focus on fugitivity.
Fugitivity connects us historically to people like Harriet Tubman and legal doctrines like the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 created federal law and policy where there was no safety for Black Life, not even in Canada, because as critical Black Canadian scholars have told us, White Canadians would sell you back into US slavery just as fast as anybody else. For us, fugitivity is more than a synonym for alternative, critical, radical, third way, otherworld, or counterscript. Fugitivity is deeply connected to plantation economies and racial capitalism.
Issues To Familiarize Yourself with/ Watch as Much as You Like:
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The prolific Black Studies theorist, Fred Moten, argues that fugitivity involves Black people’s refusal to accept unjust standards and oppression. He calls fugitivity a kind of desire and spirit that is always dreaming of escape and transgression even when not achievable. Fugitivity embraces living on the outer edges, plays with what is considered improper, and does not compromise with racist regimes by rendering them as inevitable. Jarvis Givens even further situates fugitivity as the analytic that best represents the politics of Black teaching and learning and the metanarrative of Black educational history.
These notions of fugitivity are, of course, rooted in the specific history of fugitive slaves who pursued physical and psychic forms of flight: running away from plantations, deeply respecting the underground railroad and North Star as markers of freedom, hiding in the trunk of a tree or garrison, attending “night school,” worshiping via alternative religious practices like the Abakua, living in maroon societies, and embracing African foodways and culinary practices. Fugitive success is not always about annihilation of anti-black regimes though; it is also about cleverly and joyfully thwarting them from moment to moment. For our purposes, this week's readings will be fiercely cross-disciplinary.
These notions of fugitivity are, of course, rooted in the specific history of fugitive slaves who pursued physical and psychic forms of flight: running away from plantations, deeply respecting the underground railroad and North Star as markers of freedom, hiding in the trunk of a tree or garrison, attending “night school,” worshiping via alternative religious practices like the Abakua, living in maroon societies, and embracing African foodways and culinary practices. Fugitive success is not always about annihilation of anti-black regimes though; it is also about cleverly and joyfully thwarting them from moment to moment. For our purposes, this week's readings will be fiercely cross-disciplinary.
Studies in Black ecology locate the plantation as a place from which radical Black politics emerged and where West and Central African folkways found fertile ground in the quarters and upon “the plot” of land worked by the enslaved for their personal sustenance, contributing to the flowering of a distinctly African-American sensibility. But placing Turner’s narrative alongside Benjamin Banneker’s almanac and the folklore surrounding the drinking gourd reveals how complex interactions between both land and sky, heaven and earth, form a genealogy of Black astronomy. Black folk’s observations and perceptions of the nonhuman world, while rarely afforded the legitimacy of empirical science, have nonetheless seeded many political projects of Blackness. Standing upon the terra firma of the plantation, replete with its not-yet-industrialized-or-urbanized landscapes, these radicals turned their eyes heavenward to gaze beyond the veil. They discovered in the stars a knowledge of freedom that constellates together geography, astronomy, volcanology, and meteorology among the many literacies underwriting practices of fugitivity in the antiblack world. ...from "Cosmic Literacies and Black Fugitivity" by James Padilioni Jr. |
What We're Reading...MANDATORY: Excerpts from Heather Andrea Williams's Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom ------AND------
excerpts from Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis Givens And choose one reading from below:
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Our Black |
African American Literacies by Elaine Richardson The Books of the American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by Andrea Heather Williams Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence by Keith Gilyard |
