What does existence mean for Black women without the anchor of humanity and the struggle to inhabit it? How can one be oneself without being human? What is it to become a fugitive from the confines of ‘the human’? Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender; this is a book about studying the contours of Black women’s non-humanity, to ask what people might become if they chose to flee, following the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement. This audacious manifesto investigates Black women’s processes of divesting from humanity, drawing on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others in the pantheon of Black feminism. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu combines the concepts ‘fugitive’ and ‘feminism’ to signal that Black women’s becoming must be grounded in a collective process of speculative dialogue and action for liberation. Fugitive Feminism speculates about an emancipated new world to prefigure another mode of living and being.
