Escaping Impossibility: Musings on Freedom, Fugitivity, and Black Queer Ethics

Abstract

This article forwards the idea that to be human is to be free and possible, without limiting predetermination or signification. Such a claim is ontological, establishing freedom as both a divine enterprise and an ethical aim for humanity, and recognizable in God, our neighbors, and ourselves. This article also asserts that colonization—particularly the colonial gaze—along with economies of slavery pervert the recognition of ontological freedom and establish an epistemic frame of Blackness that renders Black lives and being unlivable, impossible. However, Black queer ethics—in its construction and use of virtues, values, and practices from Black queer folks—reframes freedom by turning back to the fundamental idea of what it means to be. This article ultimately suggests that Black queer ethics makes use of the processes of creative resistance, fugitivity, and un/making to reestablish freedom for human beings who have been especially unrecognized as livable and oppressed through signification.

The new playground near my house is very popular right now. While the days are hot and sizzling and steam rises above the ground, wetting Black and Brown skin, the children play. Parents sit along the edges—some engaged in the running and the yelling and the joy of an afternoon outdoors, while others look at their phones or chat with other adults milling around the misting pole. I pass the playground with my dogs and notice the various games and navigation of space taking place all at once. Among the twenty-first-century games and playground features—bespoke jungle gym and rope toys, jumping course and wooden musical drums, sustainable wood climbing houses and soft-fall rubber on the ground—I recognize a game from my childhood: tag.

Unlike its now popular and quite professionalized descendants that boast world championships held inside large stadiums, the tag of my youth was a cost-free, low-risk (relative to the times, at least) game of chase. The chaser(s), known as “it,” run with strategy and speed around a designated area with hopes of touching (tagging) another player so that it is the tagged person’s turn to do the chasing. The chasing and tagging continues until something—a school bell, a parent’s call, a flickering street light—interrupts the game. And only an arbitrary locale called “base” protects players from capture and the sentence, “Tag, you’re it!”

Admittedly, as a child I never quite appreciated the game of tag, and I certainly took umbrage with its offshoot, freeze tag. My main issue was about running around in the heat getting dusty while missing the much more exciting discussions among the women in my family. (I wanted to hear them speak in conspiratorially loud whispers about things that I was only interested in because I was too grown.) My other issue with the game was that I could not understand the point. Frankly, I could not tell the difference between (or find value in) the fatigue of running around with my friends while trying to avoid capture or the pressure of being caught and transformed into “it” (and thus having to run harder to catch the new person). Neither of the options—the anxiety of free pursuit nor the stress of forced retreat—appealed to me. I wonder now if there was some internal part of me, even without conscientized analysis, that simply rejected a game that only seemed to have as its purpose the replay of freedom and capture—a game where winning was indistinct from losing because the choices were disempowered subjectivity and empowered objectivity. As we moved back and forth between a perpetual state of escape, on the brink of losing a self and community, and being outside of the community but in possession of the most power in the game, I could not tell which one was the better position.

Ontological Freedom: A Presumption

The essential quality of the human condition is freedom. Within a Christian-framed theological cosmology, I ascribe this claim to a notion that freedom is God’s gift to humanity and is a reflection of God’s own free existence. Mine is a particularly set and simple cosmological assumption: God is. This isness is centered on possibility, on existence without limit or predetermination. The divine quality of being, unattached to outcomes or finitude or even characteristic description, is anchored by the possibility (of existence and relation) embedded in creativity, subjectivity, and the cultivation of freedom and flourishing in others. In fact, it is the latter element—the protection and cultivation of freedom in another—that illustrates freedom’s purpose, that is, to proliferate and allow possibility to grow. Theologian Alistair McFadyen articulates the idea of divine freedom as fundamentally relational by taking a close look at the Trinity.¹ In his estimation, it is the relations, along with the mutual and co-constitutive efforts within the Trinity, that best illustrate freedom’s aim:

As McFadyen suggests, freedom is about the capacity to exist precisely as one is, precisely as one is created, in relationship to oneself and others. Human freedom is grounded in and defined by God’s freedom. As a part of God’s creative products, humans—and every other creature in the universe—are created to be. Transitive law in logic and mathematics best frames my thoughts on the matter.³ To be human is to be free. To be free is to be possible. Ergo, to be human is to be possible, without limiting predetermination or signification.

As human beings experience God’s freedom, we have the opportunity to accept and exist within the freedom that is ontologically ours. To be sure, God’s gift of freedom includes and illustrates God’s willingness to bear the consequences of human and divine freedom, even when those outcomes relate to human declarations of autonomy. As God opens Godself up to human freedom, God faces the potential of human refusal of that freedom.⁴ Recognizing possibility and freedom in God, our neighbors, and ourselves and responding appropriately is key to accepting and living into that freedom for ourselves and others. In this way, freedom is a divine enterprise as well as a human vocation; it is the end to which we point ourselves and what we aim to cultivate through relationality, true and sanctified recognition, and sacred practice. Freedom’s pursuit is indeed an ethical practice, a response to divine calling wherein the ethical posture and action is recognizing and responding to possibility.

The relational aspect of freedom evokes the question: How are we—in God’s image—supposed to be . . . together? But the existential quality of being comes before the notion of what we are supposed to do with and for one another. The doing is a matter of justice, the politics of being. Doing is about how humans relate to/with one another in light of our freedom and in service of one another’s freedom and has as its ideal love and mutual efforts toward individual and collective flourishing. Again, before we can even do that work, we have to be free. That is, we have to recognize, understand, and appreciate one another’s isness.

It seems clear that God, at least as described in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is able to maintain God’s own isness and has avoided a kind of existential capture despite humans’ best efforts. Signified identifications are certainly placed upon God, but they do not render God a slave or an object of marginality. In fact, God is always already free, illustrating to us what freedom can be, what it costs, and examples of how to live into it.

Unlike God, humans and the rest of creation are subject to our own and one another’s binding narratives, external identifications, and caricaturizations in a different way. We—most people, but especially minoritized and marginalized persons—do not have the privilege of experiencing an a priori freedom and simply maintaining the experience of our own self-understanding and autonomy; instead, many of us have an experience of ongoing and systematized signification, objectification, violence, and erasure. The process of refusing to relinquish our subjectivity or personhood or being is, then, a practice of escape, or what I understand to be an ethical project of fugitivity. It is the process of fleeing from the imprisonment of nomenclature, classification, confinement, and limit. At the same time, it is the process of producing a future, a self, and freedom that does not yet exist. Thus, being free, for us, is a matter of getting free. It is a work that we have to do. It is our politics, our ethics.

In in this essay, I am curious about the ethical refusal (of capture) and ongoing processes of escape, especially as they relate to moral subjectivity and the self. A significant part of what happens in and through nominal capture is the evisceration—or even before that, the preemptive exclusion—of a Black person’s selfhood. This exclusion points to more than an individual’s sense of self, though that is certainly a part of it; the concept of self, the existence of self, the very possibility of being is persistently and systematically foreclosed. One way that this foreclosure happens is through the constant misnaming—the signifying—that happens when we are named by another who claims the sole and ultimate power of subjective citation, which is not merely designation but literally denigration, or blackening.

I anchor my claims about Blackness and freedom in thoughts on the colonial episteme, which creates a way of knowing that constructs Blackness; fugitivity, which I understand to be an ethical response to subjective and material bondage; and unmaking, which is reparative and creative work that brings Black people closer to a subjective experience of ontological freedom. With these conceptual anchors, I see fugitivity as not merely about fleeing from the sociopolitical realities of racialized oppression; rather, it is the necessary escape from normativizing conceptual frames, regulatory schemes, and life-or-death-deciding mechanisms of signification that restrict the possibility of being. For this reason, Black folks’ efforts of self-naming, cocreating, and being have to take place through processes of undressing, of shedding skins, of unmasking, and removing the shackles of names (and subsequent caricaturizations) that have been assigned over generations. As an ethical practice and a refusal of destruction, we try to remember and live into the essence of our free being.

The Story of God and Moses: An Example

I first offered the following metaphor for the idea of refusing capture in February 2019 when I delivered a lecture during the inaugural Queer and Trans Studies in Religion Conference at University of California, Riverside. At that time, and while I was working on a book project, I found myself intrigued by a conversation between the God of Israel and Moses, the biblical character famous for leading the Israelites out of the slavery in Egypt. In the exchange, using simultaneously clear and ambiguous language, God refuses confinement and restriction by way of signification. The interplay between God and Moses displays the tension embedded in recognition, pronouncement, self-articulation, and identification.

Well before the liberation journey and while he was out “beyond the wilderness” with his father-in-law’s flock, Moses meets God.⁵ He comes upon a blazing bush and takes note that though the bush is burning, it is not consumed by the flames. Moses pauses and investigates. Meanwhile, God notices that Moses has registered curiosity and calls out to him by name. “Moses! Moses. . . . I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”⁶ Moses hears the familiar names, recalls his spiritual lineage, recognizes this God, and he is immediately afraid. He is afraid to look at—to fully see and truly perceive—God, so he hides his face. God continues, declaring to Moses that God has not forgotten Their people in Egypt and that the people will be rescued from the toils of slavery and taken to a special land that flows with milk and honey. God further informs Moses that Moses himself will be the delegate who speaks to Pharaoh and ultimately frees the people. In anticipation of the Israelite’s disbelief about his God-given responsibility and the need to establish his bona fides for them, Moses asks, “But when the Israelites ask me to give them the name of the God of their ancestors, what should I say?”⁷

I remain captivated by this question because Moses’s simple words hold within them a fairly complex query about divine ontology and, even more, about divine-human relations. Moses does not ask, “Who are you?,” since God has already identified Themselves as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Instead, Moses essentially asks, “What should I call you?,” which situates the question around the issue of identity and address. For Moses, and perhaps for us, the distinction between points of identity and address is significant, political, even ethical. God responds with the sentence, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.”⁸ This is a first-person sentence that can be translated, “I am who I am,” or perhaps, since there really is no tense in Hebrew but rather perfect and imperfect aspects, “I will be who I will be” or even “I cause to be what I cause to be.” The imperfect aspect of the verb hayah (to be) points to qualities of being that are dynamic and ongoing, and Moses learns who God is by way of God’s statement about what God does. God BEs. And so, God’s ontology is clear. I am; God is, infinitely. I will be; God is possible.

God’s response to Moses is also a lesson in how to avoid nominal capture by simultaneously answering and not being trapped by Moses’s question. I am/I will be illustrates God’s investment in description rather than identification, or worse, signification. God describes God’s self as the one who brings things into being, including God’s self. And that’s all Moses needs to know. Moses’s effort to establish an identity through naming is thwarted by God’s commitment to God’s own freedom of being. God leaves no room for Moses’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter—limiting sense of God’s existence.

Against Freedom: Race and Epistemic Frames of Anti-Blackness

As evident in Moses’s encounter with God, one affective response to the recognition of divine (and human) freedom is fear or, as nineteenth-century theologian and existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard describes it, anxiety.⁹ The nuanced difference between fear and anxiety, Kierkegaard suggests, is that fear points to something definite, something able to be named and measured. What is more dreadful and anxiety-producing, though, is infinitude. That is, the anxiety-based response to God and God’s freedom comes from the recognition of the existence of the unknown; it is the affective acknowledgment of “the possibility of possibility.”¹⁰

Kierkegaard is introducing the concept of anxiety as a way to interrogate the genesis of “bad action,” or how and why human beings engage in sin. The question of whether or not sin is original to humans or is instead an anxious response to the realization of our own freedom compels Kierkegaard to explore the value of choice within the realm of the psychological. A significant motivator for his exploration of anxiety is the desire to respond to (or participate in) Kant-inspired discussions related to freedom and autonomy.¹¹ In his treatment of the concept, Kierkegaard finds that anxiety is not simply a pathological condition but rather the confusing pathway between freedom and sin. Reflecting one’s deep awareness of freedom, anxiety is the “sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” in which human beings are both pulled in and repulsed by possibility and the infinitude of choice embedded within God’s, our own, and others’ freedom.¹²

Fear and anxiety produce and cultivate an epistemic claim: (some) humans are wholly “other” from God and therefore bear the more understandable (within Western white frames) ontological posture of bondage, obedience, and powerlessness. Such a claim is in direct contrast to and a perversion and refusal of the creation of humanity in God’s image—free, creative, responsible.¹³ This disillusion and turning away is a misuse of freedom, born from false epistemic confidence, which, (re)produced over time, becomes ontological delusion—or deluded onto-logics.¹⁴

Within such onto-logics, the nonrecognition of freedom leads to delusion, which is marked by a change in the experience of one’s ontological framework of experience that alters experiences of the world, reality, and others. This ontological delusion that freedom is unavailable and inaccessible makes way for a significant disillusion. As a perpetual state of cosmic disappointment in one sense and, in another sense, the crafty machinations (read: gaslighting) of withholding truth, disillusion becomes the means through which a fractured epistemic frame develops and grows. Furthermore, it is through delusion and disillusion that the relational, attentive, and descriptive elements of human connection turn into something unsavory. Description is perverted (as in per vertere, ill-born turning away) into falsification, attention into surveillance, and loving relationality in service of freedom into power over O/others.¹⁵

Epistemology, especially in concert with slavocratic and colonial modes of knowing and means of production, reflects the unavoidable connection between knowledge and power. The idea that one can know—or possess the full meaning of—a thing, a person, a circumstance, a history, a context, or a set of experiences is directly related to one’s power relation to what is known, to the material aspects that bear said knowledge and give it transferable meaning from one person to another. In short, epistemological frameworks reflect power relations.

Consider more specifically the epistemological impact of having one viewpoint as the locus of power and control of material resources. If one person or group is encountering the world, people, and natural resources in various contexts and has more power due to their own resources, use of force, or ascribed authority and can establish their claims about the world and people as truth, then the encountered people’s reality, intelligibility, and material worth is seen and understood only through the lens of that more powerful individual or group. This truth exists and persists even when other people—who may not have the same orientations to or resources for establishing power—offer a different knowledge or understanding about the encountered people and place. Furthermore, the newly established truth persists over and against the encountered people’s experiences, self-perception, and desires. Those people—now objects known by another—are captured in an epistemological framing of another’s making.

The colonial gaze is signifying antirecognition; it is a syphoning of possibility through false knowing. As colonization and enslavement strategies generated the Western white epistemic frame of humanity, so too did they work to establish Western white men as human and everyone else as “other.”¹⁶ This dichotomy, which mirrored the God/man separation, also reflected the free/bound relational frame mimicked between white men and their “others.”¹⁷ As dangerous as the othering is the story—the signifying construct from the colonial frame—that poses as truth in response to ontological freedom. The Western, white epistemic fallacy and ultimate failure is believing that their view of the world is objective and based on onto-logics that exist independent from their own subject position, self-perception, and articulation.

Historian of religions Charles Long discusses the development of a history of discourses that have had stifling effects on the naming, categorization, and general visualization of people of color in the world. In Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Long delineates the ways that a hermeneutics of conquest and colonialism was established during the formation of the structural and symbolic order called the “New World.”¹⁸ Essentially, Long argues that part of Western colonial expansion was the type of signification visited upon Indigenous communities and peoples of color of the world. The resulting epistemological frame from perverted recognition, and distorted onto-logics altogether, directs its energy toward a distorted and objectifying gaze.

In relation to Black and blackened people, the limiting sense of existence emerges from the colonial and slavocratic thought or epistemic frame. Used as a lens to understand what (or who) is, the colonial encounter, colonial gaze, and nominal capture constitute an understanding of truth that is not only one-way but specifically constructive of an unintelligible other. And yet the image, peoples, stories, and lives returned to the colonial gaze challenge the epistemic frame because they are incommensurable with the story. Unlike the God in Moses’s encounter, Blackness and Black people are captured in the gaze, the naming, the constructing. The freedom that God experiences—established and protected through self-knowledge and naming—is not accessible to us as an a priori truth. Our freedom is wrapped up in acts of epistemic disobedience and uses phronetic frames—practical wisdom, witness, and embodied knowledge—to escape such capture.

Limiting personhood through naming is something with which we all should be intimately familiar, especially in conversations about race—as well as sexuality and other vectors of identity, for that matter. An academic declaration now common in popular discourse is that race is socially constructed. What people mean by that is that race—both as category and descriptor—is fabricated by coconstitutive processes of meaning-making. It is both a product and producer of knowledge, practice, and being. As a marker of categories, it creates and reveals (if we are paying attention) epistemic frames and the technologies that construct them. In this way, race is always already racism, and it is based on the creation and reinscription of norms that solidify it as a foundational and natural part of the human experience and human way of knowing the world. Anti-Blackness, seen and felt in the myriad ways that people love our stuff—our food, our dance, our style, our production—but do not love us, is a natural and unavoidable outcome and producer of categories of race. It reflects an intentional measure that establishes and maintains hierarchies of social order, promotes distinctions of human kinds, and sanctions the policing and discipline of Blackened beings and other abominations that threaten the social hierarchy.

The colonial epistemological frame (the knowing that emerged from colonial encounters) mixed with a slavocracy as a set of power relations created and continues to create a mode of (un)knowing people (particularly Blackness and Black people) that has denied and will continue to deny us subjective freedom. Even though knowledge is not reducible to power, it is a product and producer of power and power relations. More than that, the machinations of colonization, imbued with power and production as frameworks for social relation, cultivate a knowing from colonizers’ perspectives that produces human kinds, denying and limiting aspects of humanity to one group or another, depending on where they’re placed on a slavocratic ladder.

The sociogeny and embedded foreclosure that colonialism and slavery render for Blackness and Black people is that we are unlivable, nay, impossible.¹⁹ That is, the nonrecognition of our freedom—prior to any labor- and exploitation-related bondage—as humans within God’s creation means that we are cut off from the possibility that humanity establishes ontologically. And the subsequent employment of our creatureliness is as objects of production and exploitation. This objectivity means that Blackness, Black lives, and Black people do not simply and only experience social death; rather, we are made impossible.²⁰

A harsh and unavoidable connection between Blackness and queerness is that the management and exploitation and marking of bodies and personhood is always already sexual, and the withholding and hoarding of power over pleasure and pain, or even over access to one’s own sensory reality, is also sexual. Jasbir K. Puar helps to clarify the connection even further in the preface to Terrorist Assemblages:

As I think through the relationship between Blackness and escape, I do so with the understanding that the very existence of Blackness as it is known and of Black people as we are codified emerges from the queering of subjects, and, likewise, our queerness is established through time-bending processes of arrest, bondage, and blackening.

In sum, the dominant response to the recognition of ontological freedom has been to narrate ourselves into various forms of bondage, and the particular perniciousness of colonial epistemologies has funded the sociogenic logic of enslavement—or general capture—of Blackened people. The inherited and ongoing projected fear of freedom from this episteme continues to manifest in both establishing and controlling an “other,” not for the sake of labor or exploitation—that is but one material outcome—but rather to locate in that “other” the less anxiety-producing epistemic views of bondage, obedience, and powerlessness. Put another way, within the white, Western colonial episteme, the knowledge or recognition of one’s own freedom and image of divinity is not met with acceptance or celebration of choice and power; rather, it is met with an anxious acknowledgment and a turning away from the awe of being (w)hol(l)y in God’s image: free, creative, responsible. The subsequent performance of power over “others” is therefore a response to a distorted onto-logic, which leads to perverted behavior.

Toward Black Queer Ethics

If the cultivation of unlivability through ontological distortions is marked by the foreclosure of possibility by way of nonrecognition, signification, and the disallowance of thriving within a shared material world, then an appropriate and ethical response must be self- and collective recognition, (re)affirmation, and (re)creation of life. My colleague and friend Laurel C. Schneider and I consider such an ethical response in our recent book, Queer Soul and Queer Theology. We discuss, in the chapter titled “Talking to the Dead,” ways that the epistemic and organizing scheme of queerness generates unlivability in various ways for those of us marked queer and thus reasonably renders us physically, socially, and sometimes religiously dead.²² Drawing on Black historical and critical discourses,²³ Schneider and I note that since relationality is a key and fundamental feature of our existence and “death is the excision of relation,” refusing and ultimately resisting death/unlivability calls for ethical practices of creating and saying something (a)new, or “speaking life” and talking to the dead.²⁴ We point to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11) and describe it thusly:

A major component of this encounter is address, which enacts “the social possibility of a livable existence.”²⁶ The address establishes livability and “human dignity” in the sense that the acknowledgment and subsequent attention to call out to another through address establishes the personhood of addresser, addressee, and witnesses. In this way, the address is the “condition of becoming a human,” and its denial serves to withhold ontological determination.²⁷

Schneider and I describe talking to the dead within the context of highlighting queer virtues and ethical postures, building on my own early work in Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination. In that work, I argue that the denial of Black queer moral subjectivity and agency in the social and religious regimes of white supremacist heteropatriarchy (dis)misses the ethically relevant ways that Black queer folks survive and thrive as full subjects. I further argue that Black queer folks have done this living and thriving in the face of ongoing and persistent bodily, social, political, and spiritual violence, which in turn has bred virtues and practices of moral excellence that I call Black queer ethics.

Continuing conversations within Black feminism, womanism, Black studies, and queer and other critical theories, Black queer ethics illustrates ways that Black queers—by living and doing our lives in spite of their signified unlivability—call into question what Sylvia Wynter describes as “the subordination of the world and well-being” of those groups of humans who experience “systemic stigmatization, social inferiorization, and dynamically produced material deprivation.”²⁸ Drawing on Black queer and Black and queer lives and experiences and refuting the epistemic canons of Western white supremacy, Black queer ethics offers a decolonial epistemic pathway, an unsettling of narratives of our being and, in turn, a practice of “epistemic disobedience.”²⁹

With such disobedience and Black queer critical consciousness, Black queer ethics not only offers a shifted epistemic frame but also makes way for new and different (i.e., not Western, white) affective postures. That is, Black queer ethics highlights ways that Black folks and Black queer folks respond not with anxiety but with awe in the face of divine and human freedom. This awe holds within it the respect, admiration, curiosity, reverence, and surrender that turns terror and dread into imagination and wonder about who we are and who we can be. Black queer ethics reframes being by returning our epistemic posture to the possibility embedded within a true recognition of the freedom in which we are made. The possibility and livability made available through a Black queer ethical lens come from the important virtues, values, and practices that we inherit, create, and (re)learn together.

Black Queer Freedom Practices

Creative Resistance

In Black Queer Ethics, I argue that Black queer people recognizing, appreciating, naming, and loving ourselves and loving one another is life-giving, creative, and resistant work based on virtues and values that we enact through practices. Among the virtues that Black queer folks describe as part of their lives is a practice that I called creative resistance.³⁰ I found that we Black queers do a remarkable job of exhibiting what Nancy L. Wilson calls “profound moral survival” by resisting negative notions of our identities and instead cultivating visions and lives in which we can joyfully and freely be.³¹ To do so, we resist three things in this work: Black impossibility and unlivability, an inextricable link between material oppression and Black subjectivity, and the absence of Black and Black queer moral reasoning and practice. I remain convinced that creative resistance is a way that Black queers move beyond vision toward the actual creation of freedom and livability. Talking to the dead, as I perceive it, is an example of creative resistance, as it “affirms livability in all that exists in the cosmos, particularly in those whose deaths have served and continue to serve globalized regimes of power.”³² It recognizes the possibility of life within what has been deemed, called, and treated as dead or unlivable while also reestablishing the necessary relationality that underwrites that livability.

Fugitivity

The type of capture (and bondage) matters in my discussion of fugitivity. In a liberty-based idea of freedom, to be free is to access and own land, to justifiably protect one’s property and rights, to choose religious expression and participation, to compete in trade, to pursue material and capital growth. If that is freedom, then bondage is involuntary servitude, restrictions on mobility, a lack of access to the material fruits of one’s own labor, bodily capture, and corporeal correction. But in an epistemological and ontological idea of freedom, capture and bondage point to a foreclosure of possibility.³³ This foreclosure is a restriction of potential and seizure of livability. Fugitivity, then, as escape from such foreclosure, exists in this space between liberty and freedom, a space that is not simply tethered to a historical reality or a new political future but instead to ongoing and material effects of slavery, or what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of property.”³⁴ So, even within a contemporary context, freedom is not something that Black folks can simply access by way of designating it as a value; rather, its pursuit comes through a process of fugitivity, of unbinding from the shackles of various forms of capture.

Such unbinding takes place within an atemporal understanding of historical realities.³⁵ In their well-known essay, “Fugitive Justice,” Stephen Best and Hartman note that freedom projects during slavery, like abolition, were incomplete and future-oriented projects taking place in a political present that advocated political futures based on “the past.” This past is not a linear description of a time “ago.” Instead, for Best and Hartman, “the past” manifests in Black folks’ “contemporary experiences of statelessness, social death, and disposability.”³⁶ They draw on Hortense Spillers’s work in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:”

Spillers here alerts us to a kind of time loop that reveals the fallacy in distinctions that encourage us to think chronologically. Part of what she does is uncover the perpetual legacy of violence that lingers on the precarious personhood of Black folks. The notion of a “liberated” existence merely points back to the prior reality of captivity.

Fugitivity, in its simultaneous practice and pursuit of freedom, highlights this loop and refutes a notion of a past that is not also and already embedded in the present and subsequently speaking to the future. And contemporary fugitives bend, twist, and transform those linear ideas of time by recognizing how the specter of slavery continues to haunt, shape, and define contemporary Black life.³⁸ As fugitivity is a response to this signifying specter and ongoing significations, it is more than flight from (anti-Black) racism. It is refusal and avoidance—an escape—from the signifying matrices, including all the episteme and techne that foreclose possibility. Therefore, Black folks’ declarations of selfhood through creativity, naming, and unapologetic existence happen through processes of excavation and undressing and even unbinding ourselves from the significations developed, articulated, and acted upon for generations. It is our effort to undo nominal violence for the sake of and by way of pursuing ontological self-discovery, or what one might call self-remembering.

Such remembering requires a belief in a historical otherwise. That is, it depends upon a spiritual, conceptual, and embodied investment in a reality that testifies to our existence prior to our naming—because if naming is a significant part of what apprehends our subjectivity, in the process turning us into objects other than ourselves, then it follows that we were subjects who could be apprehended in the first place. It is the naming that confirms earlier existence by simultaneously acknowledging a being that is “before” while attempting to foreclose any potential being that may come “after.” This connection of our origin with the points of (mis)naming is a move of subject deformation that invalidates our capacity to know ourselves before we were “Black” . . . or blackened, as it were.

Recognizing and Reclaiming Our Selves

The work of self-projection establishes a new source for moral reasoning and ethical consideration that is no longer located externally but instead develops from inside oneself and one’s people. When we can name and know ourselves and know the world through a different lens, then our sources for engaging ethically with ourselves, our communities, and our environments are our own bodies, experiences, observations, interpretations, senses, and shared stories. For such engagement to happen, we have to shift our epistemological frame to include self and then relation, thereby grounding our relations with other beings, other creatures, in a positive, loving, and respectful relation with ourselves.

For Black folks—and others who are signified as unlivable—loving the self and caring for the self is necessary work. Even more, trusting that self’s perspective after its denigration has been internalized is a feat of overcoming that often takes miracles, major work, and intentional healing to do. It marks, as Benae Alexandria Beamon suggests, “the ways in which Black people [who] were not written into an ethical system,” yet were surveilled by and disciplined within it, work to constitute new ethical systems through which to make meaning and execute livability.³⁹

Caring for oneself is a part of the practice of freedom. Black feminist ethicist Nicole Symmonds describes the ethics of self-love and self-care that grounds relations with others as “a reflective move wherein one deeply considers oneself for who and what one is in the world. . . . It is akin to the flight guidance that [we] should secure [our] own oxygen mask before attending to anyone else.”⁴⁰ Symmonds draws her work from Michel Foucault’s suggestion that the practice of freedom can shape an honorable and beautiful ethos.⁴¹ For Foucault, this ethos is close to a “virtue ethic wherein one is compelled not by what one does in the world but by who one is in the world.”⁴² Thus, this conversion to a positive ethos through self-love and self-care becomes instrumental to how we can be in relationship with one another. Even more, such an approach to ethics, according to Symmonds’s reading of Foucault, signals a necessary rupture between subject and object.⁴³ If there is a subject in ethics, it is and ought to be the self, not merely a projection of the subjectivized other.

Poet, essayist, and teacher-activist June Jordan teaches us how valuable real attention to self as a moral subject and moral agent really is. She concludes her 1978 “Poem for South African Women” with what is now a very popular declaration: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”⁴⁴ With this statement, written in honor of the inspiring and effective direct action through which South African women demanded justice, Jordan points to a clear moral subject/agent. More than that, she declares that the future and the past are now, and we are the people to make it so. In short, if we are indeed the ones, then now is the time; and, likewise, if revolution is happening, if freedom is on our tongues, then we are the ones creating it, tasting it. Black feminist scholar and self-named Black queer troublemaker Alexis Pauline Gumbs notes that this “double we,” which includes “us in both the categories of the waiting and the waiting for, the wanting and the wanted, the captive and the liberator” suggests that we are not who we thought we were or who they told us we were.⁴⁵ No, we are more. “And more than that, our wanting—what we perceived as a lack—was actually rich with the insight of how the world must change.”⁴⁶

Un/making and Remaking the Self

The pursuit and rediscovery of our freedom is a nonlinear multistep process of un/making and remaking the self, and as such, it is always a genealogical project. It is a retelling of history from the place of flight, but it is more remarkably the claiming of a history in the first place. Within this retelling and claiming work, unmaking and remaking the self is necessary for Black folks to confront and unsettle the lie of our own nonexistence, and draws on and even evokes a new account of that existence.⁴⁷ The new account represents the work of “de-linking oneself from the knowledge systems” that produce and (de)construct Black life.⁴⁸ The genealogical aspect of this new accounting is not merely in the telling or creating of a story from a new source that is (at least) seemingly more accurately told from the perspective of a witness to one’s own existence, though those stories are important too. And Wynter articulates how necessary it is to notice the full sources and reasoning for the development of such “mythologies.”⁴⁹ But the genealogy is found in the story of “before” and also in the story of “now,” which Judith Butler argues is always “the story of relations—or set of relations—to the norm.”⁵⁰ In this accounting, or unmaking, one gets to discover precisely what constitutes that norm and how one’s own existence is situated in relation to it. The genealogy has the double effects of external whistleblowing and internal awakening, conscientizing, and reconstitution.

The confrontational aspect of un/making and remaking is crucial because it not only calls attention to the fallacy of signification by highlighting the (non)subject’s relation to the norm; it also deliberately uncovers the relational component of subject formation. Within the colonial and slavocratic epistemic frame, Blackness and Black people are not only made “other” but are also the necessary components that constitute the master, the colonizer, the oppressor. As the genealogical un/making project interrogates what is being created on both ends, it exposes the falsehood in both the oppressor and the oppressed’s assumed, ascribed, or denied subjectivity. In short, we need to recognize that the existence of whiteness comes only as a result of having falsified the existence of—and then named—a queer Blackness or a Black queerness. It is the undoing of such Blackness that makes room for the un/making and then remaking of subjectivity and selfhood for Black folks.

Un/making follows what Gloria E. Anzaldúa calls the “Coyolxauhqui imperative: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos (scars) resulting from woundings, traumas, racism, and other acts of violation que hechan pedazos nuestras almas (that shatter our souls), split us, scatter our energies, and haunt us.”⁵¹ For Anzaldúa, this imperative is an act of “calling back those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost, the act of mourning the losses that haunt us.”⁵² And even though this act creates the space of possibility, it is also one of struggle. Anzaldúa calls this struggle space nepantla and describes it as “the point of contact . . . between worlds—between imagination and physical existence, between ordinary and nonordinary . . . realities.”⁵³ Black fugitive un/making and remaking happens in such a space of possibility, struggle, memory, and tension.

In the larger project that this essay informs, I engage three elements that inform un/making and remaking: nominal citation, the gaze, and the address. The gaze plays a significant part in recognition and reorientation. Feminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway describes the gaze by first noting that the embodied nature of the sense of vision has meant that “the eyes have been used . . . to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.”⁵⁴ The power, here, is located in the capacity to literally see—to observe, monitor, surveil—which comes from having access to points of view, time to view, and mechanisms for viewing, as well as the ability to see and not be seen.⁵⁵ She thus calls this seeing the “conquering gaze from nowhere.”⁵⁶ Writing about the context of surveillance of Africans on a slave ship and echoing Long’s outline of a hermeneutics of conquest, Simone Browne recalls Haraway’s discussion and notes how the “always unmarked gazer” is “already markedly white and male . . . [claiming] power to represent without representation.”⁵⁷

An essential part of the work of fugitivity is to recognize the gaze for what it is and to challenge the “knowing” that the so-called subject tries to claim over his “object.” As Wynter notes, it is such challenging and shifted knowing that brings to light an epistemic lens that reframes an understanding of the human.⁵⁸ In Wretched of the Earth, pointing to the framework of colonized and colonizer (or colonist), Frantz Fanon articulates the epistemological truth and falsity produced from the gaze. He says, “The colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says that he ‘knows’ them. It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.”⁵⁹ This is the colonial frame mentioned above. This fabrication requires that in the process of fugitivity we recognize ourselves outside of the gaze and reorient our own senses and perceptions of the world, our relations, and our possibilities.

Such reorientation is the work in which Black gay filmmaker, essayist, and poet Marlon Riggs beautifully engaged in his 1987 documentary, Ethnic Notions. By reexamining the anti-Black stereotypes that permeated popular culture for at least two centuries, Riggs turned the spotlight on a version of American history that underwrites anti-Black prejudice and violence. In the film, he reframes the “knowing” of Blackness as the fabricated product of a gaze that comes from an a priori investment in Black servility and suppression. Riggs continued this gaze-shifting work in Tongues Untied, a 1994 experimental film in which he uses the lens of Black gay men to refract the racism, homophobia, and silencing that they experience in the context of the United States. The view that Riggs highlights with camera positions and perspectives literally invites the viewer into a new frame of view, a frame in which the surrounding racist and homophobic world is in direct contrast with what the viewer thinks and feels about them/ourselves. Even more, the chasm between those views is held in the unspoken and silent, yet very loud, acknowledgement of the viewer as “other.”

The distance between (mis)representation and (non)address frames Riggs’s strategy of providing footage that details elements of Black gay male culture. In the film, we see him, along with Essex Hemphill and other artists, reconstituting Black people—and in that specific case, Black gay men—as a part of the category of human. Refusing social death by recognizing themselves and one another allows Riggs, Hemphill, and others to affirm their own livable existence.⁶⁰ One can see such reconstitution through address in various of areas of Black life, including the use of call-and-response in Black religious spaces. For example, “Can I get an amen?” refrains in interactive preaching do this work. The communities speak to and with God through and with each other. Amen, rather than being a simple supplication (“So we ask for your protection, Oh God. Amen.”), becomes a solicitation: “And we know that you are a provider. Amen? . . . Amen.” The reconstitution also exists in the rhythms of Black vernacular with dialectical phrases embedded within conversational speech. These can be found most obviously in the punctuation of conversations with “You feel me?” or “Nah mean?”; or if you’re from the Northeast, “Nah’m sayin’?”; or if you’re from New Orleans, “Ya heard?”; or if you’re from a place further south, like Jamaica or other Caribbean spots, “Ya’unnastan?” What we can hear in those constructions of speech is a continual reminder of address, an acknowledgment of a recognizable and dignified “you,” dignified of course through the recognition and address itself. Additionally, the practice of reconstitution extends beyond speech to other creative production like music, art, and dance. We can see it in jazz and tap dance, especially, as the relational and improvisational practice of a jam session calls into the art exchange histories, the present, and conversations in the moment.

This creative work of reconstitution makes room for another element of un/making and remaking: re-creation. If constituting oneself and one’s people is an investment in the accessibility of “the human” as a category of being, then creating is an investment in new kinds of humanness, new ways of understanding what it means to be human, to have a livable existence as human, and to understand that existence as a process of making the human. Fanon and Wynter understand this work as decolonial and separately suggest that the liberative process is the creation of the human.⁶¹ The affective refusal of the sobriquet-turned-epithet and a projection of selfhood through the creation of a new possibility or kind is a marker of self-creation. The challenge to the category of human opens the opportunity for the re-creation of a self, as the creator’s projection of selfhood is simultaneously an affirmation of moral subjectivity and an act of moral agency, signaling a subjectivity that shifts from performing an alienated humanity to asserting their own.

Conclusion: Rethinking Freedom and Some Questions

The prevailing concept of humanity is tied up with Western white epistemes through which freedom is then entangled with notions of liberty and focuses on rights, free markets, behavioral permissions, and license in general. This concept is how and why, for example, people have conflated the Emancipation Proclamation with Black people’s freedom in the United States and have been confused about how it did not (and does not) afford Black folks with the full rights and benefits of citizenship. This is a problem both of the notion of humanity and the idea of freedom.

For Wynter, a necessary ethical project is to disrupt a concept of humanity that is definitive of and synonymous with white men and that leads to such a stifled and misguided framing of freedom. For life to persist, it is necessary to liberate the notion of the human/subject. Even more, within a context of inequality and oppression, such freedom is parceled out as “rights”—economic, social, and political commodities to which one might have full, limited, or no access. This kind of freedom obscures what womanist ethicist Emilie Townes calls the “fantastic hegemonic imagination,” which underwrites the systems that ascribe varying degrees of worth, virtue, and agency to human subjects.⁶² Even more, this definition of freedom (dis)misses the reality that the historic construction of “the human,” as a descriptive category from a colonial viewpoint, was written onto and then used to exploit Black lives and bodies, marking them as fungible objects that demarcate boundaries between human and other. To be sure, basic rights are an important element of human experiences within nation-states, but a notion of freedom that relies solely upon such rights and the capacity to offer or deny them to others is a pernicious remnant of a colonialist project underwritten by an anti-Black slavocracy.

This is the danger in conflating freedom and liberation, especially if liberation efforts go unscrutinized. Foucault attends to this danger in his essay “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”:

Foucault here suggests that the practice of freedom is an ethical act distinct from liberation.⁶⁴ Practices of liberation often position the self as subject only in relation to group membership or access to a community in favor of the unnamed “common good,” thereby marking a recognized collective as the actual subject. This subjectivized group may still demarcate individual selves as external to the central subject position, ultimately queering them in the process. Conversely, practices of freedom position the self as a subject who then uses new ethical frames of love, pleasure, and joy to relate to the whole. Thus, a focus on self-love through the fugitive project of queer un/making might actually lead to collective liberative life and flourishing. Black queer practices of freedom may be showing us how liberation projects are better executed through a focus on ourselves as ethical subjects who have often been ignored, discounted, and/or erased and who have seemed to be without virtue.

Black queer fugitivity generates moral reasoning and action. Black queers are pushing conceptual boundaries and asking, with our lives and bodies, with our families and modes of survival, “What if freedom is not a right but rather an existential condition that is available to and potentially experienced by every human subject?” And we are living into a belief that freedom is available . . . through multiple and intersecting layers of escape.

But I still have questions. They remain the same as when I started this thought project years ago. How can we revel in our Blackness without seeing ourselves only as Black, with all the muck that such a colonizing gaze brings? How can we imagine and live into notions of self-love in a context where our livability and subjectivity is constantly under threat or simply denied? How do we move from objects to subjects? How can we continue to undo the work of the ever-present colonial frame that signifies on our existences? How much of our energy will it cost to take to create ourselves anew? To create in a way that resists foreclosure and capture? In short, how can we be free?

In this discussion, I have suggested that we remember that, though it is ours—and an originary and fundamental part of our being—freedom for Black folks is a matter of escape, not simple access. We also remember that our freedom was and continues to be the price paid for others’ liberty and dreams of power. And we ought to remind ourselves that our freedom is tied up in one another’s existence, in one another’s access to and experience of freedom. These recognitions, memories, and reminders are our narratives of fugitivity. They are the (re)conscientizing mechanisms that form the bases of our ethical endeavors. Our fugitive narratives expose the lies of objective and historical epistemologies that fuel denigration propaganda, fund anti-Black racism, sanction our imprisonment, and justify our assassinations. Ultimately, our fugitivity helps us realize what God was trying to avoid in talking with Moses: the fatal violence of having someone call you out yo’ name.

That God utters, “I am/I will be,” in the context of setting out a process of freedom-making is an exciting message and modeling for the Israelites and for Moses and a good example for what fugitivity proffers. “I will be” is a new way of thinking and seeing oneself, a way that had to be adopted for people being liberated from the material effects of slavery. Liberation is one step toward freedom; figuring out who to be once liberated from bondage—epistemological or otherwise—is something altogether different. It is a fugitive process, where escape from a self-understanding of enslavement, or from seeing oneself only as a “former slave,” requires a willingness to claim a subjectivity, a new existence—one not named and defined by someone else.

Black queer folks have been reiterating these messages to us over and over again. And I am particularly compelled by James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Hemphill’s profound and clear self-declarations. Baldwin describes freedom as not having to pretend to be anything other than what you are. For him, it is the release of pretense, of masks, and of self-informing lies that mark freedom.⁶⁵ Lorde articulates freedom through an uninhibited self-description: “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.”⁶⁶ And Hemphill provides the source and aim of freedom by saying plainly, “I love myself enough to be who I am.”⁶⁷

So, again, how can we be (free)? We recognize—who we are, created fully and (w)holy free. We notice movement in the dark, the lies and names as well as their contributions to our destruction. We tell the truth—to ourselves about ourselves. We listen to the stories of our people, to our own beating hearts, to the rhythms that give us energy to run. We imagine things that we have not yet perceived. We remember that creative work, especially self-(re)creation and naming, is holy and divine work. We rest. We self-care. We create life. And we love it unapologetically and with every bit of our being. And repeat.

Notes

References