Illegible Fugitivity and Subversive Resistances: African Diaspora Roots of Decoloniality

As community psychology increasingly assigns decolonial designations to theory and research, practitioners face the possibility that decoloniality options within a colonial project require persistent and insubordinate acts of resistance, as well as generative creation of new pathways toward sovereignty. This essay explores the role of coded insider communication systems, including the production of what some Hip Hop theorists refer to as dark matter: the force generated at the innermost point of a break-dance circle to stimulate communal expressions of re-existence and haptic exchanges. Parallel energies are cultivated through music, artwork, objects, story, poetry, aesthetics, image, movement, and gesture that retain subversive metaphorical meanings. As a result, obscured transcripts circulate throughout global communities to become àjé (collective power) for emergent forms of renewal, creativity, and restoration. These transformational forces are brought to bear in everyday encounters for Black and Indigenous communities including professionals, scholars, and students.