Mutual Glances, Mutual Stories:
Towards a Black Fugitive Cartography of Brussels
The concept of fugitivity, as it has been developed in Black American and Caribbean literature, refers to the history of slavery and the flight of the Maroons from the plantations. As Fred Moten put it, fugitivity is a ‘desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed.’ Sorana Munsya and Véronique Clette-Gakuba explore this concept in the context of contemporary Belgium in the cartographic project Fugitive Cartography of Brussels. At the heart of the project is a map revealing the fleeting and ephemeral nature of Black spaces in the postcolonial context of Brussels.
As it unfolds in the Black Studies and Afrofeminist approaches of thinkers such as Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt, fugitivity is deeply grounded in refusal and resistance. It is rooted in detachment from an order of enslavement. It acts out as ‘a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible’ 1. Through conversations with the Practicing Refusal Collective, Tina Campt came to this understanding of refusal, which is also at t (…)
