SubjectsAfrican American Studies and Black Diaspora, American Studies, Literature and Literary Studies > Poetry In Maroon Choreography Fahima Ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of Black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine Black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, Ife unsettles the history and idea of Black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in Black study, Ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown.
“Maroon Choreography reads like liner notes for a dance unwitnessed except by sound, or a dramaturgy for a dance recorded by the mud and roots of trees who would have been the only audience. It is obscure but everywhere. More unknowable than little-known. It participates in the important recent critical practice that goes beyond applying or extending theory and instead insists there is something else to perceive and another way to perceive it.” — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony “With great erudition and deep musicality, Fahima Ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have been made to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.” — Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur