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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, West Central Africans drew from differing intellectual and political traditions to mediate the unprecedented violence unleashed by the Portuguese. My project, Fugitive Modernities: Politics Outside the State in Kisama, Angola, and the Americas, c. 1500-1698, focuses on the strategies of those in Kisama, Angola, who rejected state politics, resisting the incursions of both African states and the Portuguese as well as nomadic bands of Imbangala, whose practices were themselves radical responses to upheaval, and on those fugitives in the Americas who articulated Kisama identities as part of their political discourse. Based on archival, oral historical, linguistic, and ethnographic research in Angola, Brazil, Colombia, Portugal, and Spain, this project represents the first effort to incorporate pre-colonial African intellectual and political histories into a finely grained, historicized study of early modernity and the trans-Atlantic world.