"A Spirit of Disobedience": Black Women Freedom Runners and the Collective Practice of Abolition

Author

Delice Mugabo, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Committee Members

Dana-Ain Davis

Marc Lamont Hill

Katherine McKittrick

Subject Categories

Human Geography

Keywords

Black Feminism, Black Geographies, Black Atlantic, Historical Geography

Abstract

This research focuses on the geography of slavery and resistance in eighteenth-century Quebec. It aims both to understand the geographies of constraint, captivity, and violence, and to trace how Black women freedom runners moved through these geographies. I examine how multiple scales of isolation shaped the violence of slavery and analyse how manumission was used in Quebec to perpetuate and accentuate Black people’s isolation after their enslavement. Paying attention to the political realignments created by the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, I demonstrate how Black women and white slaveowners understood Quebec’s geography of isolation as one in which the landscape could be used to create freedom or to reinforce captivity. I contend that Black women freedom runners both navigated and rearranged the legal geography of Quebec to gain their freedom.

Indeed, I use “freedom runners” instead of “fugitives” to center the political project that Black people were running towards instead of the owners and institutions they were running from. This study is about looking into Black women’s freedom runs as a manifestation of their political acumen and their interjection into colonial and imperial politics. I contend that fissures in the political landscape were not coincidental or circumstantial, but rather inherent to the Black Atlantic. In other words, I use the term “fissures” to describe the routes that Black women freedom runners used for their escape, even though they were not intended for Black resistance or subversion. Rather than a total opening or a sudden move from unfreedom to freedom, then, enslaved Black women had to identify small veins in the landscape and in the law, subtle fissures that made movement and flight possible.

Recommended Citation

Mugabo, Delice, ""A Spirit of Disobedience": Black Women Freedom Runners and the Collective Practice of Abolition" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5918