Always Incomplete:  Fugitivity, Refusal, and Hapticality in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's Home

In his book “The University and the Undercommons,” Black studies scholar Fred Moten examines what it means to be a fugitive. For Moten, fugitivity is a way of  “being together in homelessness," a posture of life that is “separate from settling." To be fugitive means to recognize that “there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the [normative order]” (Harney, 2013, p. 11). Ultimately, for Moten, fugitivity is a praxis that centers on “reaching out to find connection” (Harney, 2013, p. 5).

By observing two central characters in the Black aesthetic archive, specifically from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Home, I elaborate upon elements of Moten’s notion of fugitivity. Fugitivity is constitutive of Black sociality in America – by embracing strategies of refusal and hapticality, these characters generate strategies of resisting genealogies of oppression, antiblackness, and apartheid that produce new modalities of living beyond our present.

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The narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man engages in fugitivity by refusing the tools of economic dispossession, which functions as an endurance strategy against confiscatory neoliberal regimes. For Moten, to “refuse what has been refused to us” is a fugitive maneuver that produces tactics for moving against the grain of normative social terrains (Harney, 2013, p. 8). In Invisible Man, the narrator engages in this refusal by divorcing himself from the Brotherhood’s contradictory political projects; he insists that he “would falsify the attendance records by filling out membership cards with fictitious names -- all unemployed, of course, so as to avoid any question of dues” (Ellison, 1952, p. 510). By hotwiring the Brotherhood’s regime of documentation and surveillance, the narrator’s strategic sabotage of this institution exhibits a fugitive refusal of antiblack politics and communal subordination. In turn, Ellison pictures the modes of resistance that characterize quotidian black life. As a signifier of Black sociality in America, the narrator’s refusal provides insight into how Black life is contiguous with a militant negation of the modes of accumulation, surveillance, and dispossession by governmental and political regimes that ultimately resubordinate the dispossessed.

In addition to refusal, Moten also theorizes fugitivity as a mode of being that forms communities of care that amalgamate into hapticality. He defines it as the “capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you” (Harney, 2013, p. 98). In Home, Ethel, and more broadly, Cee’s network of caretakers engage in hapticality by practicing an ethic of care. Aligned with the notions of feel, togetherness, and community building, Ethel and her friends assemble a space that attends to Cee and her illness: “surrounded by their comings and goings, listening to their talk, their songs, following their instructions, Cee had nothing to do but pay them the attention she had never given them before.” (Morrison, 2012, p. 122). Morrison depicts a feeling of togetherness by illustrating the exchange of dialogue, music, and communal bonding that rubs against the grain of a patriarchal model of male-led projects. Put differently, Ethel and her peers produce a space of relation that equips Black people with endurance strategies to combat antiblack violence, such as Dr. Beau’s predatory medical procedures. Under a broader lens, Morrison cultivates a commentary on how Black women, although lodged against a genealogy of racial and gendered dispossession, endure against these flights of oppression by forming around an ethic of care that prioritizes the dismantling of dominant power structures, which ultimately forms a fugitive praxis centered around relationalities of love, care, and attendance to the dispossessed.

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Leveraging Fred Moten’s “The University and the Undercommons” as a framing tool to filter works in the Black aesthetic archive highlights that Black sociality in America is coterminous with producing strategies to dismantle the architectural scaffoldings of oppression. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s narrator refuses the Brotherhood’s tactics to surveil workers, which pictures a moment of deconstructing the tools used to propagate Black subordination. Additionally, in Home, Toni Morrison illustrates hapticality by providing a window into the methods of care, attendance, and love that Black women exercise to resist antiblackness and racism. Both instances show that Black social life embodies fugitivity; on this side of the Atlantic, Black communities have forged a path through and against the modalities of oppression, antiblackness, and violence in civil society, starting from the premise that we share a collective experience of dispossession and uprootedness.