Black Fugitive Performance as Eschatological Hope

This paper explores the eschatological significance of Black identity by construing Blackness as fugitive performance. It aims to establish the Black body as a site and symbol of Christian hope without abstracting or distancing it from the experiences of subjection that shape its historical reality. Accordingly, it considers the ambivalence and multidimensionality of Blackness as a choreography of freedom within captivity, a lived performance in which the shape of Black life is seen to simultaneously reflect, resist, and transcend the constraints and definitions imposed upon it by antiblack violence. Through a theo-choreographic interpretation of Harriet Jacobs’ garret experience, it proposes that Black bodies are constituted in, as, and through fugitive performance and identifies this performance as the instantiation of Black hope. Such hope anticipates the redemption, transformation, and glorification of Blackness and gestures toward a notion of eschatological identity that suffuses and transcends the limitations of oppressed existence.