Freedom As Marronage

" Freedom as Marronage" deepens our understanding of political freedom not only by situating slavery as freedom s opposite condition, but also by investigating the experiential significance of the equally important liminal and transitional social space "between" slavery and freedom. Roberts examines a specific form of flight from slavery"marronage"that was fundamental to the experience of Haitian slavery, but is integral to understanding the Haitian Revolution and has widespread application to European, New World, and black Diasporic societies. He pays close attention to the experience of the process by which people emerge "from "slavery "to "freedom, contending that freedom as marronage presents a useful conceptual device for those interested in understanding both normative ideals of political freedom and the origin of those ideals. Roberts investigates the dual anti-colonial and anti-slavery Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and especially the ideas of German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt, Irish political theorist Philip Pettit, American fugitive-turned ex-slave Frederick Douglass, and the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant in developing a theory of freedom that offers a compelling interpretive lens to understand the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and political language that still confront us today."

Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg reveals as never before how significant numbers of enslaved Africans across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her sweeping view of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. Helg not only underscores the agency of those who managed to become "free people of color" before abolitionism took hold but also assesses in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized. While recognizing the powerful forces supporting slavery, Helg articulates four primary liberation strategies: flight and marronage; manumission by legal document; military service, for men, in exchange for promised emancipation; and revolt—along with a willingness to exploit any weakness in the domination system. Helg looks at such actions at both individual and community levels and in the context of national and international political movements. Bringing together the broad currents of liberal abolitionism with an original analysis of forms of manumission and marronage, Slave No More deepens our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and even children contributed to the slow demise of slavery.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. In Louisiana and other parts of the American South, the Caribbean, and South America, escaped African and Native peoples formed "maroon communities" deep in swamps and mountains. Historians refer to the permanent establishment of these free settlements as "grand marronage." Similarly, Creole communities in New Orleans resisted Jim Crow--but at whose expense? This book examines the lives of New Orleans' Creole women of color, told through multiple generations. The women of GRAND MARRONAGE find ways to diminish the impacts of racism and sexism, but not without cost. What must be given up for safety? How is the chain of familial trauma broken? What does inclusive liberation demand from us? The unspoken--in both family history and the historical record--is given breath in this multigenerational lyric. GRAND MARRONAGE is a map of the spiritual maroon community created by Creole foremothers, and a beginning of the work still to be done for this marronage to be complete.

This book is about the struggles of enslaved Africans in the Americas who achieved freedom through flight and the establishment of Maroon communities in the face of overwhelming military odds on the part of the slaveholders.

The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

In this detailed, brilliantly researched book, historian Lennox Honychurch tells the enthralling and previously untold story of how the Maroons of Dominica challenged the colonial powers in a heroic struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society. The Maroons, runaways who escaped slavery, formed their own community on the Caribbean island. Much has been written about the Maroons of Jamaica, little about the Maroons of Dominica. This book redresses this gap. Honychurch takes the reader deep into the forested hinterland of Dominica to explore the political, social, and economic impact of the Maroons and details their struggles and victories.

Frederick Douglass (1818--1895) was a prolific writer and public speaker whose impact on American literature and history has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass's profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued. In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author's autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass's understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass also considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass's passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass's complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass's contributions to pre-- and post--Civil War jurisprudence.