"The Fugitive World: Life and Death in the Shadow of the State," a work in progress by Ben Mauk

The Fugitive World: Life and Death in the Shadow of the State is a work of narrative nonfiction about communities living on the margins of state administration. Based on six years of reporting across a dozen countries, the book features profiles and histories of nomads, refugees, insurgents, squatters, pastoralists, and other irregular citizens and non-citizens living in geographies ranging from the Celebes Sea in Southeast Asia to the Arctic Circle. The opening chapter follows so-called “sea nomads” living across the disputed maritime border between the Philippines and East Malaysia. Other chapters bring the reader inside a special economic zone in Kazakhstan, concentration camps in China, hunter-gatherer encampments in Malaysia, a feminist revolution in Syria, and a community of reindeer herders in Norway.

I will read short excerpts from The Fugitive World and discuss its efforts to draw connections among radically different communities based on shared experiences of fugitivity, together with a disposition that might be called state-averse. I will interrogate the ethically fraught traditions (immersive journalism, travel writing, anthropology) in which the book participates and describe some of its central animating thinkers and concepts, including Adorno and Horkheimer’s “administered world,” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s “marginality,” Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s “borderscapes,” James C. Scott’s “infrapolitics,” and Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resources.
Ben Mauk is Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing in the Department of English at CWRU. He is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist, writer, and filmmaker, often reporting on the politics of borders and peripheries. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications, and he is an editor-at-large at The Dial. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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