Akwugo Emejulu

Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement? This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of 'human'. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the 'fugitive' that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

Fugitive Feminism

now i get why mawla said this was mindblowing as fuck because oh my god??!?! i gasped and reacted audibly on some of the propositions because it really pushed me to unlearn the concept of "humanity" that colonial structures pushed upon me. like, it was implicit in me that humanity was always aspirational whiteness. but to see that truth being plainly written and laid out bare, the conclusion of the logic that humanity never wanted to include the Other (and especially black women) into its scope--it shocked me into discomfort & a new lens.

being indonesian, & also being a fair-skinned, muslim, & middle-upper class woman, & especially being raised in a family where gender never limited aspirations (but gender norms were still enforced), the idea of not being human had never occurred to me. yet it is obvious how being a black woman in the Anglo-Americansphere, as Emejulu recounted here, would lead to the conclusion that humanity(=whiteness) was unattainable. rather than trying to reach that colonial end goal - what if we reject the binary categorization of human/Other altogether? what if we reject false binaries as a whole?

i'm going to sit with the ideas presented in here for a long time, & will refer back to it a lot. i like the use of being a "[social] being" rather than a "human" - diction matters. being is an object and an action. i think it encompasses more so of exactly how we move through this world & operate through our interiority & phenomenal experience, rather than that weighted, bloodied word of [hu]man.

madina

now i get why mawla said this was mindblowing as fuck because oh my god??!?! i gasped and reacted audibly on some of the propositions because it really pushed me to unlearn the concept of "humanity" that colonial structures pushed upon me. like, it was implicit in me that humanity was always aspirational whiteness. but to see that truth being plainly written and laid out bare, the conclusion of the logic that humanity never wanted to include the Other (and especially black women) into its scope--it shocked me into discomfort & a new lens.

being indonesian, & also being a fair-skinned, muslim, & middle-upper class woman, & especially being raised in a family where gender never limited aspirations (but gender norms were still enforced), the idea of not being human had never occurred to me. yet it is obvious how being a black woman in the Anglo-Americansphere, as Emejulu recounted here, would lead to the conclusion that humanity(=whiteness) was unattainable. rather than trying to reach that colonial end goal - what if we reject the binary categorization of human/Other altogether? what if we reject false binaries as a whole?

i'm going to sit with the ideas presented in here for a long time, & will refer back to it a lot. i like the use of being a "[social] being" rather than a "human" - diction matters. being is an object and an action. i think it encompasses more so of exactly how we move through this world & operate through our interiority & phenomenal experience, rather than that weighted, bloodied word of [hu]man.

Fugitive Feminism

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