Atlantic Passage and the Fugitive Text

Abstract

Abstract This essay intervenes in global histories of theory and exile modernism by developing fugitivity as a capacious lens for examining entangled histories of flight and artistic practice in the Atlantic world. I draw on theorist and poet Fred Moten’s theorization of the concept to foreground a missed encounter between fugitivity’s Antillean history and the communist writer Anna Seghers, whose escape from European fascism places her in a Martinique internment camp in 1941. After examining how fugitivity uneasily merges histories of Black struggle and art with a tradition of modernist antifascist writing, I proceed by closely reading Seghers’s novella on the Haitian revolution, Die Hochzeit von Haiti (1948). Seghers’s text, I argue, imagines fugitive struggle and marronage as a lawless, ‘deranged’ freedom. I show how the novella’s own historiographic and narrative framing redouble the efforts of its protagonists to regulate fugitive struggle via various forms of mastery, most notably: literacy.