In his important essay interrogating the (im)possibility of black sociality, Fred Moten attempts to find an order of black social life that would unfold in the very confrontation between black (social) death and the law. However, as he argues, this form of black life would be "reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression." The form of black life that interests Moten is essentially one of "fugitivity." In a recent response to Moten's text, David Marriott worries that "by writing blackness as ceaseless fugitivity," Moten advances "a position in which blackness is only black when it exceeds its racial disavowal" and therefore blackness "can only be recognized as black in so far as it escapes the racism of its history." In this course, we will trace and follow the implications of Moten's intervention. More specifically, we will explore what forms and figures of sovereignty an aesthetics and politics of fugitive subjectivity could yield given that "black life" remains arguably the most precarious form of living under various contemporary "necropolitical" apparatuses of racial exclusion, control, persecution and--in worse cases--genocide. Key figures will include Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Povinelli. |