Dialogues among ‘necrolocutors’ and fugitives

Abstract

This exploratory commentary invites readers to situate ‘the necrolocutor’ in dialogue with ‘the fugitive’ – an agent uncovered by Fred Moten and Stephano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Harney and Moten, 2013). I aim to briefly examine how the necrolocutor not only administers power, knowledge, and death (in line with the ant logic carefully dissected by Gibson) but also co-produces multiple scales and modes of fugitivity, refusing to engage in participatory practices.

‘Ant Logic and Necrolocutors’ is a compelling and thought-provoking article examining the limits of binary thinking for understanding the manifold ways in which power, knowledge, and death shape environmental research practices. This insightful piece invites political ecologists and geographers to remember and critically revisit the constraints, contradictions, and ‘tyrannies’ of participatory approaches. The necroloculor is introduced by Lydia Gibson (2026) as a ‘mediating’ actor involved in epistemic, racial, gendered, and political ‘Othering.' As an actor, it can take many forms and asymmetrical roles within the controversial and coercive stages of participatory research. Necrolocutors may be community leaders, key collaborators, ‘gatekeepers’, local elites, Indigenous knowledge holders, diasporic researchers among many others. Gibson persuasively shows how the necrolocutor ‘engages, exploits, and determines the visibility (and invisibility) of different actors’, spaces and ontologies, as it collaborates with other immaterial actors: power, knowledge, and death.

This exploratory commentary invites readers to situate ‘the necrolocutor’ in dialogue with ‘the fugitive’, an agent uncovered by Fred Moten and Stephano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Harney and Moten, 2013). I aim to briefly examine how the necrolocutor, not only administers power, knowledge, and death (in line with the ant logic carefully dissected by Gibson) but also co-produces multiple scales and modes of fugitivity, refusing to engage in participatory practices. Accordingly, I briefly reflect on how both necrolocutors and the fugitives produce subjects, bodies, spaces, and futurist possibilities.

Visible and opaque subjects

Gibson clearly explains how necrolocutors render visible and legitimize specific subjects as ‘worthy’ of participating in environmental research and in Eurocentric knowledge production. In this process, they silence, marginalize, and obliterate ‘the fugitives’ – those who do not align with and refuse the expectations and commitments (of transparency, authenticity, presence, clarity, compliance, and bodily discipline) required by participatory practices and its academic funders. Yet, the necrolocutor's task is not totalizing; it is always incomplete. Its participatory roles and duties – such as attending meetings, signing collaborative and institutional agreements, lobbying with elites, negotiating with dissenters, participating in long workshops, creating colourful biodiversity maps, speaking on behalf of their communities, and representing or repressing specific gendered, sexualized, racialized, political, or religious groups – leave ‘trails’ of manoeuvre that may be reused and navigated by ‘fugitives’.

Fugitivity produces specific subjects. In the context of participatory research, fugitives refuse to engage, they dissent with the terms of engagement of doing research about and with them. Jack Haberstam (in dialogue with Moten and Harney) argues that the fugitives’ right to refuse is, in fact, the right to refuse the choice and terms of engagement (with participatory research). Refusal is not inactivity, it is about ‘refusing to be for or against for and against logic’ (Halberstam, 2013: 9). Thus, while the necrolocutor claims for visibility and recognition, the fugitive instead claims for the ‘right of opacity’. As stated by Édouard Glissant, opacity involves resisting Western understandings and categorizations and their forms of visibility, intelligibility, and transparency. ‘To acclaim the right to opacity … is to establish that the inextricable, planted in the obscure, also drives clarities that are not imperative’ (Glissant and Loric, 2012: 77).

Borrowing from Moten's and Harney's words again, fugitive subjects who emerge in the ‘undercommons’ of knowledge production may be recognized by the ‘ant logic gaze’ as disengaged, apathetic, desconfiados (suspicious), deserters, and conflictive. More romantic gazes may see them as politically subversive, truly committed, irreverent, radical: as the ‘authentic subalterns’. In different Latin American spaces, the buhonero(a) (informal street vendors), the raspachin (coca leaf picker), people in mental health care or in caring positions, the illegally armed, the artisanal miner, the desplazad(as) (displaced), the tobero (cocoa traffickers), the caminantes (the walkers), the imprisoned, the under/undocumented, the sex workers among many others – embrace fugitivity (not as an intrinsic ontological subaltern position), but as a voluntarist stance that refuses academic categorization and alienation. Fugitives can rarely afford or don’t have the privilege of engaging in Eurocentric research practices and its modalities of visibility and transparency. These fugitives are in continual movement away from the normative frameworks and societal expectations that are frequently prescribed by mainstreamed participatory methodologies. As stated by Moten and Harney fugitivity is an unsettled state of being, a state of constant motion that transcends mere physical escaping, exiting, or exodus from the ‘death zones’ of academia and knowledge production (Harney and Moten, 2013).

Gendered and racialized bodies

Fugitivity also refuses reductionist understandings of racialized bodies and identities, reframing subjects as complex, subversive, and active. Practices of refusal, operating alongside practices of disengagement, are central to Black fugitivity and extend beyond common understandings of resistance. Black feminists, such as Hortense Spillers (1987), Sadiya Hartman (2016), and Tiffany Lethabo King (2016) remind us that the black body, even when degendered, re-gendered, and captivated by power, knowledge, and death, still holds spaces for subversive restitution. Spillers reminds us of the existence of spaces of manoeuvre and the inscribed hieroglyphs written in black bodies, which are subject to interpretation but not always fully visible or intelligible for engaging in participatory research. According to Spillers (1987: 68), the ‘female flesh ungendered’ offers a praxis and insurgent ground; it is text for living or dying. From this perspective, both the necrocloutor and the fugitive can call for new readings on the always-already gratuitous death of black bodies, while recognising their flickering, changing, unstable, porous states and borders. However, a possible distinctive aspect of the fugitive is its active refusal to fungibility. By refusing to be the subject and object of research and academic knowledge production, fugitives become incommensurable, unexchangable, and opaque to Eurocentric technologies of power.

Again, the ‘right to opacity’ serves the fugitive to remain unseen, unexploited, undefined, uncategorized, and ‘free’. However, questions persist regarding the gendered, sexual, and abled experiences of the fugitives and necrolocutors who engage in participatory research. While Moten suggests that the fugitive does not seek to fix what has been broken, but instead aims to be ‘together in brokenness’, we may still ask if there are possibilities for repairing the many broken gendered, disabled, and sexualized bodies existing in fugitive communities and spaces. Are there ways of moving away from captivity and beyond the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2010) within fugitive projects?

Co-produced spatiality

Necrolocutors produce and legitimize material and social spaces for implementing ‘accountable, transparent and fundable’ participatory Eurocentric interventions. Fugitives, on the other hand, aim to challenge these spatial arrangements by transforming these spaces into sites of resistance and futurist dreaming and by creating alternative decolonial projects and methodologies (Bledsoe, 2017; Ferretti, 2024; Gross-Wyrtzen and Moulton, 2023). Fugitive actors (the cimarrones) not only refuse oppression and the material and epistemic violences of Eurocentric knowledges, but they strategically create spaces of cimarronaje (marronage) at the interstices of state bureaucracies and academic institutions, within legal systems, social relations, and spiritual communities (García, 2006).

However, necrolocutors and fugitives not only engage in antagonistic binary positions. In Latin America, for instance, necrolocutors (local gatekeepers or recognizable ‘knowledge holders’ participating in research projects) co-produce with ‘fugitives’ multiple spaces: rural and urban quilombos and palenques, agroecological or educational cumbes, allyus, Indigenous demarcated territories, reservas campesinas, rescued or liberated haciendas (farms), urban and rural Indigenous cabildos, Zapatista caracoles, ejidos, patios tureros, trochas (trails for migrants) among many other spaces. In these spaces, which have been targeted by local and global research dispositifs, knowledge is co-produced, extracted, sifted, protected, silenced, returned, and commodified by necrolocutors, fugitives, and external actors in uneven ways.

Possibilities, worlds, and futures

Fugitivity is also linked to the creation of alternative futures and new possibilities for living (Campt, 2017). In this regard, Tina Campt reminds us that fugitivity is always connected to ‘strives for futurity’ and ‘refusal’, it ‘simultaneously animate and suspends … creative strategies of refusal’ (2017: 9–10). In her view, refusal cannot be seen only as responses to extreme violence or to states of exceptions, but as an attitude present in everyday encounters and reclamations of dignity.

Others see fugitivity as a ‘method’ that invites collectives to work against disciplinary enclosures of formal knowledge production (Gross-Wyrtzen and Moulton, 2023) (whether participatory, feminist, egalitarian, emancipatory, or popular). Maroon communities present viable futures for Black struggles; they create new forms of being in the world and unique possibilities (Bledsoe, 2017). Following Rose-Redwood et al. (2024: 180), it may be argued that the fugitive, as well as the necrolocutor unevenly engage in the ‘interplay between re-futuring and de-futuring’ their forms of knowledge production, depending on their specific space-time trajectories.

The boundaries between necrolocutors and fugitives are blurry and unstable. A necrolocutor also has the potential of becoming a fugitive, moving ‘…from bondage, conscription and silence to flight, marronage and voice’ (Feldman, 2021: 12). Participatory research produces disavowal and disengagement from academic projects and state-led initiatives, making participants feel and experience extractivism, tiredness, subjection, cynicism, tokenism, co-option, and alienation. These participatory coercive practices can spark changes and even propel necrolocutors to become future fugitives who will refuse the logical and the logistical of the so-called research participant ‘position’.

While Gibson effectively decenters the human and explores, for instance, how power and death are in themselves immaterial actors, it may be worth revisiting the necrolocutor and the fugitive as agents who travel, ‘turn’ and move across multiple worlds (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2020). The necrolocutor travels not only in the spaces of the ‘ant’, but across plural worlds with humans and non-human beings, partially connected and in most cases unintelligible (Fitzgerald, 2022). Recognizing pluriversality in this dialogue can help us challenge the role of the necrolocutor, who claims to be the single visible ‘owner’, keeper, holder, voice, and guarantor of participatory-derived knowledge. Pluriversal approaches, seeking to move beyond one-worldism, embrace refusal to ideological stabilization, while creating openness to alternative ways of disclosing, narrating, and imagining knowledge and fugitive futures (Odysseos, 2017). Yet geographers have already warned about the need to keep challenging the colonial violence and extractivism of academic disciplines, despite recognizing plural worlds and coexisting trajectories (Rose-Redwood et al., 2024). Post-human feminism might also keep us aware of the uneven ways in which the necrolocutor, the ‘ant colony’ and the fugitives are constantly (re)colonized, (de)humanized, gendered, sexualized, and abled in research spaces (Braidotti, 2017).

The aim is not to suppress the antagonisms among necrolocutors and fugitives, nor to reify their binary distinctions (as I have probably done in this commentary). The invitation instead is to ‘experiment with the informal capacities’ of the undercommons (Williams et al., 2016: 53) and to be aware of how necrolocutors may become future fugitives or how fugitives may act in some cases as necrolocutors depending on their situated and relational experiences. Refusing or engaging in participatory research, is an unstable process; always (almost always) involved in the administration of life and death.