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A personal, provocative, and boundary-breaking volume on the power relations that racialized, gendered, and sexualized researchers grapple with while conducting activist research.

Fugitive Anthropology is a transnational, intergenerational engagement that extends feminist theory, activist research methodologies, and the discipline of anthropology in new directions. Contributors examine the tensions that arise from conducting politically engaged, collaborative research alongside communities in struggle, in particular theorizing from the experiences of racialized women, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming researchers across distinct geographies. Essays contend with the matrices of colonial, imperial, and patriarchal violence that afflict the researchers and communities with which they seek political alignment.

Articulating an ethnographic practice grounded in Black and Indigenous political struggles and committed to collective liberation, the volume reflects on what it means to navigate violent relations of power, systemic inequities, and current onslaughts shaping field research and US academia. Ultimately, Fugitive Anthropology argues that a feminist ethos—one that embraces embodied knowledges and fugitive sensibilities—forges liberatory spaces that break from dominant masculinist frames of the “political” and challenge colonial regimes within and beyond the neoliberal university.

Unsettling Geographies offers an original approach to examining Guyana’s post-independence political landscape, tracing how colonial imaginaries of frontier extraction—the plantation and the bush—haunt everyday life. From an embodied ethnographic attunement to the erasure of Indigenous political life and the racialized intimacies that transgress partitioned geographies of the coastland and hinterland, Shanya Cordis puts forth what she calls “relational difference,” a feminist framework that illuminates the co-constitutive logics of Indigenous dispossession, antiblackness, and gendered violence that undergird capital. She critically interrogates state and party politics that promise the good life yet situate Indigenous peoples and working-class Afro- and Indo-Guyanese as sacrifices to developmentalism’s seemingly progressive arc. These colonial logics operate through the gendered and sexualized positioning of Amerindian, African, and Indian bodies under the plantation system, recognition policies, and the appropriation and economic management of Indigenous territories that inform contemporary land relations. Formulating relational difference as a means to render visible interlocking relations of power, Cordis disrupts the mirage of political parties and the state as the arbiters of redress, gesturing toward liberatory possibilities and relational ways of being.