Reimagining Fugitive Democracy and Transformative Sanctuary with Black Frontline Communities in the Underground Railroad

Published date01 October 2019
Date01 October 2019
DOI10.1177/0090591719828725
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719828725
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(5) 646 –673
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719828725
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Article
Reimagining Fugitive
Democracy and
Transformative
Sanctuary with Black
Frontline Communities
in the Underground
Railroad
Lia Haro1 and Romand Coles1
Abstract
This article engages new histories of the black frontline communities of
the Underground Railroad to rethink both fugitive democracy and the
transformative possibilities of sanctuary as its constitutive twin. We analyze
the ways that communities of free blacks and fugitives in the border zones
between the Antebellum US North and South crafted themselves as magnetic
spaces of creative refuge that suggest we reconceive sanctuary as the
generative twin of fugitivity. This insight enables us to theorize new ethical
and political dimensions of Sheldon Wolin’s concept fugitive democracy by
illuminating how fugitivity as flight away from danger can be interwoven with
sanctuary as flight into and toward alternatives. Specifically, we theorize
three dimensions of fugitive democracy/transformative sanctuary—
sanctuary tending, dramatic sanctuary, and disruptive hospitality. While
some theorists have considered key motifs in Wolin’s fugitive democracy
to be opposed to vital themes disclosed in contemporary theories of black
fugitivity, we argue that the power of black frontline communities stemmed
1Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, North Sydney, NSW, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Lia Haro, Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, 1033 Darkwood Road,
Thora, NSW 2454, Australia.
Email: liaharo@me.com
828725PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719828725Political TheoryHaro and Coles
research-article2019
Haro and Coles 647
precisely from their capacities to dynamically entangle political approaches
(mis)taken to be at odds. For example, we suggest a theory and practice
of tending involving both nurturing care and militantly defensive action,
dramatic sanctuary performances that amplify public power by oscillating
between tricky concealment and flagrant publicity, and disruptive hospitality
that interweaves law-breaking harbor with strategies for juridical and
institutional change. These insights open onto an alternative imaginary that
can also provide a toolbox for building grassroots democratic power today,
particularly in the face of emergent neofascism and escalating displacement
worldwide.
Keywords
Sanctuary, Radical Democracy, Fugitive Democracy, Underground Railroad,
Black Fugitive Thought, Social Transformation
Experts predict that climate change intersecting with violence, extreme
poverty, and political breakdown will result in between 200 and 700 mil-
lion displaced people searching for shelter within and beyond national bor-
ders by 2050—many “illegally.”1 High levels of crisis-driven human
mobility for the foreseeable future are grave challenges confronting
democracy today—as is already becoming evident around the world. Toni
Morrison recently observed:
Excluding the height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the mass
movement of peoples in the latter half of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first is greater than it has ever been. It is a
movement of workers, intellectuals, refugees, and immigrants, crossing
oceans and continents, through customs offices or in flimsy boats, speaking
multiple languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution, war,
violence, and poverty.2
In that light, we should ask: What happens to democratic horizons when mass
global displacement begins to overwhelm contemporary political practices and
paradigms premised on greater stability—however thoroughly they are entan-
gled in disavowed histories of massive displacement, slavery, and genocide?
At the same time, as growing numbers of people find themselves in
physical flight and instability, democracy itself is also on the run.3 Sheldon
Wolin has argued that democracy, whereby citizens actively strive to cocre-
ate and sustain the well-being of complex commonwealth against incredi-
ble odds, has historically been confined to fugitive “democratic moments.”4

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