Fugitivity in African American Women’s Migration Narratives

Abstract

"If you assume black women’s life writings locate a free subjectivity within white patriarchal imperialist spaces, rather than in a self-conscious and choreographed fugitivity, then you will not read the texts they write. For even before Phillis Wheatley engaged in eighteenth-century transatlantic migrations, black women’s life narratives have inscribed, and continue to document, our fugitive disidentifications. To disregard black women’s fugitivity is to risk misreading black women’s lives and life writings. Anti-blackness everywhere has always required black women to construct a fugitive selfhood that exploits and subverts the very invisibility that white patriarchal imperialism imposes on them."