Conjuring Lines of Flight in a World of Black Social Death

Abstract

It is not often that an academic text takes you on a journey. fahima ife’s book of essays and poetry, Maroon Choreography, invites us to theorize not by defining and analyzing but rather by inhabiting an undocumented past of escape from slavery that links to present-day escapes from slavery’s afterlife. In this process of imagining, the text engages with an important conversation within Black studies, critical theory, and performance studies. Maroon Choreography “attempts to move outside the blackness-asenslavement narrative, to move inside a collective Black interior by way of breathing” (p. xii). The author’s poetic description of their own present-day flight into the bayou leads us into a kind of subjunctive past world—a world that might have been, a world of seven Black Indigenous escapees who (might have) refused the choreographies pressed on them by the increasingly mechanized plantation economies of the 17th century North American colonies. Many elements of the text bring us back to this theme of escape—imagined flight that we nonetheless know must have happened, whether in big or small events, because Black and Indigenous people have survived the long and ongoing terror of enslavement and genocide that is baked into the very structure of the modern world. In a sense, that flight, that moving “outside the blackness-as-enslavement narrative” and “inside a collective Black interior,” while never strictly defined, looks like many things in this text. In the chapter “recrudescence,” for example, it looks like the author having “a single encounter—a conversation and an erotic mo(ve)ment i shared with a friend” (p. 83) in which they “slipped inside the wild open secret of the marsh” (p. 86) and “... blackness/glistens and slips inside/night’s moist opening/listens to night/call light to life memory” (p. 5). Elsewhere, ife names some of the means of flight found repeatedly in Black life across multiple times and spaces within modernity: “the backwoods fugue, the juke joint, the hush