Fugitive Solidarity: Border Transgressions Against Colonialism and Capitalism

Borders are infrastructures—material, psychic, and epistemic—that govern life and death. In Fugitive Solidarity, Nivi Manchanda analyzes borders as key mechanisms of global ordering through which the historical and ongoing operations of colonialism and capitalism, and their concomitant need for disposability and differentiation, are articulated and reproduced. And yet, borderzones, precisely because they are sites of brutality and abandonment, also generate fugitive possibilities: of solidarity, refusal, and modes of survival that exceed the logics of inclusion and recognition. This book assembles a palimpsestic counter-archive through four activist-intellectuals whose lives and writings were shaped by distinct yet resonant border formations: Gloria Anzaldúa, Temsüla Ao, Jean Genet, and Huey P. Newton. Rather than offering a comprehensive theory of the border, Manchanda traces their situated engagements with colonialism, carcerality, and racial capitalism. Two additional thinkers—Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant—provide the book's epistemic and ontological anchors: Wynter unsettling the coloniality at the heart of border-making; Glissant redirecting attention from enclosure toward the counter-topography of relation and connection. Together they allow the book to read its quartet not only as scholars and activists but as poets in the broadest sense: writers whose lyrical sensitivity to struggle, survival, and refusal opens new coordinates for thinking the border otherwise.