Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?

This audacious manifesto investigates Black women’s processes of divesting from humanity, drawing on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

“With this theoretical understanding and her experiences as a feminist activist, Emejulu diverges from her forebearers and assertively asks “[w]hat is the point of being political and doing politics in a system that cannot and will not see you as human?”. Herein lies the book’s boldest proposal, which is to not only identify the failed promise of human but also the necessity to rebel against it by participating in “an audacious and dangerous act of self-liberation”. Her attempt to answer the question above shapes Fugitive Feminism as a work of what may be called political speculation.” (from a review by Avani Ashtekar for LSE Review of Books)

Foreword by Edna Bonhomme.

Paperback, published in 2022, 136 pages.