4.1: Context and Foundation

Modes of Abolitionist Praxis

To appropriately provide the context and foundation for how this chapter seeks to engage modes of abolitionist praxis, it is imperative we think through modes of being and how Black modes of being produce inherent forms of fugitivity. Fred Moten argues, "The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist. Blackness— the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that arranges every line— is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity."[1] 

Moten highlights a  specific tension at play here: attempting to reduce humans to objects. Understanding abolitionist praxis requires us to not only account for this tension, but to pressure the concepts of personhood and subjectivity when thinking through Black modes of being. At stake for engaging, understanding, challenging, and overthrowing anti-Black practices and creating true liberation is dismantling and erasing notions and ideologies that attempt to reduce humans to objects. Moten’s notion that, “blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist,” highlights a counter understanding about personhood and subjectivity: Blackness operates as an inherent antagonism to objectification, serving as an “upheaval, an ongoing irruption” to possession. The upheaval and ongoing irruption against possession demands acts of fugitivity and abolition to systems that seek to capture, enslave, and relegate the body to modes of being that steal, objectify, and possess. This chapter engages in a critical analysis of these various modes of fugitivity and abolition, offering otherwise ways of engaging with the world using these modes of fugitivity and abolition to open pathways to alternative modes of knowing and being.

Normative understandings of abolition work typically center the capacity to dismantle plantation societies through the harrowing feats of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas or the elimination of the prison industrial complex highlighting the theoretical output of George Jackson, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. This chapter recognizes the foundational work of the aforementioned abolitionist and posits them as key and necessary for normative understandings of abolition work, and this chapter seeks to contribute to their and the growing discourse on abolition work by thinking about ways dispossession expands our understanding of abolition.  By working through the triangulation of abolition, fugitivity, and dispossession, this chapter produces critical analytic work that positions fugitivity as a praxis of abolition, and this in turn, expands ideas of fugitivity with non-traditional abolitionist practices that move with, alongside, through, and against the grain of normative academics.

Enslaved narratives, fugitive acts of learning, and alternative modes of being become fecund sites of investigation when exploring the possibilities of abolition. Returning to the work of Moten, who critiques the subject through the work of Saidiya Hartman argues,

A critique of the subject animates Hartman’s work. It bears the trace, therefore, of a movement exemplified by an aspect of Judith Butler’s massive theoretical contribution wherein the call to subjectivity is understood also as a call to subjection and subjugation and appeals for redress or protection to the state or to the structure or idea of citizenship— as well as modes of radical performativity or subversive impersonation— are always already embedded in the structure they would escape.[2]  

When the subject is Blackness or the Black individual, the oppositional relationship to the state, structure, or iterations of citizenship are predetermined in the very ethos of Western society. The state and structure sought to render Blackness as inhuman chattel, 3/5 human, non-citizen. Naturally, the attempts of Black people to redress from the state or structure was not heeded, or at best was met with minimal simulations of progress. Henceforth, if the functioning of the state and structures that uphold the state is to deny Black humanity, then the state and the structures that support it must be abolished and reimagined otherwise.

Disposession and Negation 

The necessity of abolition at the state and structural level while justified, is admittedly a complex undertaking. However, notions of personal dispossession and negation against subjection and subjugation offer a personal praxis of abolition. In her seminal text Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Hartman performs an intellectual act of negation asserting,

I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass’ account of the beating of Aunt Hester in order to call attention to the ease with which such sense are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the [en]slave’s ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity…especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.[3]

This passage from Hartman highlights the power of negation at the intellectual level, in this case, as the ability to avoid the reproduction of the spectacle or the scene of subjection. Hartman’s act of intellectual dispossession seeks to subvert the desire of these scenes of subjection to render those subjected to terror as inhuman, returning us to the tension at the heart of this problematic: equating Blackness to objectification. Hartman probes this tension further asserting,

I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captive’s bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person (whether understood as a legal subject formally endowed with limited rights and protections, a submissive, culpable or criminal agent, or one possessing restricted capacities for self-fashioning) has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery, the constitution of this humanity remains to be considered.[4]

Hartman highlights the embedded contradiction in the attempts to make human beings chattel, and in this particular contradiction, she re-centers modes of Black being as an act of intellectual fugitivity, dispossession, abolition, and negation.

 A return to the work of Moten here becomes fecund, as he contemplates Hartman’s attempts to negate the reproduction of Aunt Hester’s beating. Moten affirms,

Indeed, Hartman’s considerable, formidable, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing (re)production of that performance in all its guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originality of that primal scene. What are the politics of this unavoidable and reproductive performance? What is held in the ongoing disruption of it primarily? What shape must a culture take when it is so (un)grounded? What does this disturbance of capture and genesis give to black performance?[5]

These series of inquiries around the possibility of Black performance is the ideal point of entry for engaging notions of abolition rooted in the triangulation of abolition, fugitivity, and dispossession. The guiding inquiry for this chapter is: how does the Black performance of fugitivity and dispossession produce an abolitionist praxis that creates alternative and dynamic modes of being?

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Endnotes

[1] Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003. 1

[2] Ibid. 2

[3] Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1997. 3

[4] Ibid. 5

[5] Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003. 4