In African American poetry, fugitive voice may emerge through themes of pursuit, secrecy, coded language, displacement, survival, and refusal of capture, especially in relation to slavery and its afterlives. The concept also extends metaphorically to marginalised speech resisting surveillance or containment. It helps explain poetry where voice itself appears mobile, guarded, defiant, or difficult to fully possess.

Fugitive voice in African American poetry draws on the literal history of enslaved people who fled bondage — figures like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and the thousands of anonymous freedom seekers — and transforms that history into a poetic mode characterised by indirection, coded language, movement between registers, and the consciousness of being pursued. The fugitive voice never entirely settles; it retains the awareness of danger even in apparent safety. Students should connect this term to related historical and theoretical concepts including the Underground Railroad, maroon communities, and Giorgio Agamben's theorisation of bare life. Related terms include runaway narrative, Underground Railroad, signifyin, and carceral imagination.