black studies

to have a barbecue or a dance—all forms of unrestricted sociality that they slyly call “study.”

“Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.”

For Moten, blackness is something “fugitive,” as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere.