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The Epilogue revisits the implications of tying together in critical analysis Equiano’s story and that of Wimbush, including their mutual interest in escaping slavery and finding a place for the safe cultivation of radical agency through “reading” white men’s magic or scripturalization(s).

This is the first of two chapters exploring the Haitian Revolution, the only known successful human slave revolution. Both chapters highlight the value of marronage for our modern political vocabulary by redefining its conventional usage so as to delineate freedom’s meaning in the revolution and to present freedom as marronage as a heuristic device useful to political theorists working in multiple geopolitical contexts. Chapter three examines two central Francophone documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: 1) Code Noir, 2) French Declaration. Examination of their articles uncovers a juridical paradox unresolved by the revolution’s beginning. The chapter outlines thereafter three types of marronage (petit, grand, sovereign) that serve as a response to questions left unanswered hitherto in the book. Its crux is inquiry into the benefits and limitations of sovereign marronage and sovereign marronage’s manifestation in the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture. It challenges enduring rhetoric in the popular imagination that collapses into one Toussaint’s freedom and all the principles forged during the Haitian revolution. The last section posits that Toussaint’s vision of the future is not the only notion of flight operative in the Saint-Domingue uprising.

This essay examines the nature, scope and consequences of the seism of memory since its eruption in 2000 in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. In particular, it questions how the context of a multifaceted appetite for collective remembrance took the form of competing strategies for memorialization in the space. As such, it focuses on the heritage of pain, resistance and pride at the local, national and regional levels. I draw on Shalini Puri’s analysis of the repressed memory of the 1983 Grenada revolution in Operation Urgent Memory to identify in the landscape of Guadeloupe submerged, residual and eruptive ‘platforms of memory’ (Puri, 2012). In the specific case of Guadeloupe, the collective efforts of the Guadeloupean people for re-appropriating their non-French and non-European heritage on the island have turned into competitive post-traumatic approaches of the history of transatlantic slave trade. This essay eventually analyses the case of the Mémorial ACTe (MACTe) – Museum of Contemporary Caribbean Art and Memorial for the History of the Slave Trade – as constituting the most successful expression of what I define as cultural marronage, in the ambivalent postcolonial environment of the French Overseas Regions.

This chapter takes the story of the Big Snake, a famous oral tradition among maroon descendants in the Trombetas river (called mocambeiros in the region), as a symbol of their relocation to new residential spaces below the waterfalls, where they would fully enjoy their hard-won freedom right after abolition. The chapter places the narrative in conversation with “outside sources that can be checked and certified as independent,” such as police and governmental reports, travel accounts, genealogical trees, and interviews with the mocambeiros. With this I seek to generate a dialogue between narrative and written sources and to dig as deep as possible into its key natural and topological symbols. I considered the tradition of the Big Snake a “hypothesis,” a source that could enter into dialogue with, and even correct, “other perspectives just as much as other perspectives [could] correct” it. The story of the Big Snake also uses the river’s natural geography to sustain an interpretation of the maroons’ origins that emphasized autonomy and community. Finally, it bears witness to the sheer centrality of the natural landscape for the viability of maroon communities in Amazonia.

This chapter examines the Jamaican Maroons' recollection of their captivity and marronage. It suggests that the Maroons never needed any help in recalling the ordeal of slavery because their very identity was predicated on a history of resistance to enslavement. Their struggles for liberation had actually helped them emerged as a people and their distinctive culture and ethnic label served as a constant reminder of the long and successful war their ancestors had waged against their British captors. This chapter illustrates its arguments with Maroon oral history narratives and the text of sacred songs related to their recollection of their captivity and marronage.

This chapter is about the resistance to becoming an object for theological-philosophical reflection. Attention is given to the ways choreography and sonicity work together, how there is a choreosonic ethical demand that is germane to Blackpentecostal performance. This word, choreosonic, indexes the ways vibration is foundational to both sound and dance, how each is about vibration in and against worlds. The chapter elaborates indeterminacy at the heart of Blackpentecostal performance and celebrates such indeterminacy.

This essay examines the persuasive fit between the biographical evidence of Claude McKay’s life, his characterization of Bita Plant as a maroon figure returning to “the point of entanglement” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 26), and the continuum of masculine subjectivity in McKay’s work, from Jake/ Ray to Banjo/Ray to Bita. The author posits the idea of Bita as McKay’s maroon self returned in drag on two bases: one, that the life of a vagabond troubadour, and the habit of literary self-portrait had so become second nature to McKay, that he was unable to inhabit a less ambiguous, less tricksterish persona; two, that McKay’s unresolved issues with his mother and father play out as impersonation or ventriloquism, reconciliation, exorcism, and homage in the figure of Bita. The essay argues also that McKay’s lifelong and haunting need to return to the country of his birth played out in this literary disguise in which, if we also see Bita as Jamaica developing a decolonized subjectivity, her move is from (feminized) colonial territory to an authoritative republic of the self.

The Dutch started to develop parts of the Guianas mainly because they had not succeeded in conquering, defending and exploiting Caribbean islands suitable for profitable plantation agriculture. The colonial economies remained fragile and growth would increasingly depend on credits extended from the Republic. The one unique and lasting Dutch contribution to the technology of sugar production was the adaptation of the Dutch polder system to plantation agriculture. The population of the colonies was overwhelmingly of African birth and descent, and almost entirely enslaved. While manumission was rare, in Suriname the major route out of slavery was marronage, and Berbice saw a major slave revolt, which almost ended Dutch rule.

Although plantation agriculture did exist, what made the Dutch islands special, in particular Curacao and Statia, was their functioning as regional entrepôts. Demographically, the large number of Jewish settlers and German soldiers is striking on Curaçao, as is the early development of a considerable community of free people of African and Eurafrican origins. The merchant community of Statia was amongst the most cosmopolitan in the Americas, with Protestant Dutch settlers a minority group and English as the prevailing language. Marronage may have functioned as a safety valve for the slave system, but outright revolts also occurred on Curaçao, at least on four occasions. Metropolitan Dutch cultural influence was limited and did not block the emergence of a relatively stable Creole culture nurtured more by the island’s regional connections than by its links to a faraway metropolis.

This chapter frames the context for the main interrelated questions the book answers: 1) what are some distinct concepts of freedom emerging out of the experience of slavery? 2) What important insights does analyzing the relationship between slavery and freedom provide to political theorists that they do not know, have ignored, or have not sufficiently investigated? The introduction defines the concept of marronage, first by explaining its historical and conventional usages; and second, by delineating novel forms of marronage employed subsequently in the book. It utilizes the work Aimé Césaire and James C. Scott to accomplish. Furthermore, it outlines key dimensions of flight absent from contemporary fugitive theory and provides a rationalization for why marronage is an essential heuristic device. The chapter turns to demarcation of two alternative traditions of freedom theorizing in Western thought (negative and positive), thereby demonstrating a void left by their static notions of freedom. It suggests the idea of marronage fills the conceptual chasm. The remainder of the chapter examines the advantages and shortcomings of Orlando Patterson’s thought, outlines recent developments in intellectual traditions rethinking political theory from modernity’s underside, and concludes with the book prospectus.

This chapter deciphers principles developed during the Haitian Revolution by slave masses in flight. Its twofold objectives are a refutation of scholarship reducing the notions of freedom in the revolution to Toussaint’s vision; and explanation of the transhistorical, macropolitical, sociogenic conception of flight. Prior interpretations of marronage and the revolution describe flight while reifying a long-standing false binary in studies of slave societies: flight or structural reordering, whereby acts of flight are separated from investigations into revolutionary politics. The chapter argues sociogenic marronage allows us finally to discern how revolutions are themselves moments of flight ushering in new orders. Frantz Fanon’s philosophy illuminates facets of the sociogenic and reaffirms the importance of the psychological to the lived experience of freedom. Sociogenic marronage has four core principles: 1) naming, 2) imagined blueprints of freedom [vèvè architectonics], 3) the state of society, and 4) constitutionalism. Examination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s Declaration of Independence, the activities of slaves, Haiti’s 1805 Constitution, and an Edwidge Danticat short story vis-à-vis these principles underscore revolution’s relation to flight. It also highlights an adage of marronage philosophy: the ability of individuals to become free and to exit from that condition is fundamental to the human condition.

This chapter examines Édouard Glissant’s thought within the wider discourses on creolization and creolizing political theory. It also marks a shift in the book to describing marronage’s relevance for late modernity. The chapter provides a philosophical reading of two Glissant texts (one novel, one essay collection) from his early and middle period that engage historical and imaginative forms of marronage. By exploring types of marronage in these works Glissant develops original concepts framing what the chapter contends is Glissant’s four-stage blueprint for sociogenic marronage: 1) rearticulating a philosophy of history, 2) retour (reversion/return) and détour (diversion/detour), 3) resistance, and 4) Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The chapter subsequently explores Glissant’s use of the rhizome idea and how lines of flight explain modes of marronage as an economy of survival, state of being, and condition of becoming, whether through fleeting fugitive acts, attempts at liberation, or the constitution of freedom. The implications of Glissant’s conception of marronage for contemporary debates over France’s commemoration of abolition, the Arab Spring, and relation between mainland France and French overseas départements including Martinique are addressed. The ending briefly discusses immigration politics and the figure of the refugee-immigrant as a late modern maroon.

This chapter broadens discourse on marronage through exploration into a late modern maroon movement: Rastafari. Rastafari speech acts inform its interpretation of freedom and the evolving disposition of its members towards the state. The chapter begins with reflection on Peter Tosh’s lyrical commentary on flight, temporality, and revolution. Elucidation of Tosh’s lament on the inability of masses globally to understand marronage and acknowledge a singular philosophical worldview shaping orders of unfreedom precedes the brief overview of core Rastafari tenets. The description of Rastafari livity (way of life) includes explanation of its unique political language and preoccupations: Babylon, Zion, dread, love, reasoning reparations, repatriation, unfreedom, and freedom. The chapter argues globalization and doctrinal transformations among branches of Rastafari in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and across the world have led to shifts in Rastafari beliefs on the nature of flight (physical and spiritual), itself representation of debates on flight addressed throughout the book. For these reasons, it asserts that the ongoing benefits and challenges of Rastafari present us with a rubric to appreciate freedom’s meaning and why marronage still matters.

This chapter argues that Jones’s book-length poem Song for Anninho and novel Mosquito challenge death-bound theories of personhood through their narrational modes of flight, fugitivity, and sanctuary. It examines Jones’s depictions of historical and contemporary forms of sanctuary that organize the storyworlds of each text, including the seventeenth-century colonial Brazilian marronage community of Palmares, church sanctuary law, the North American Underground Railroad, and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement for unauthorized immigrant refugees. Responding to collapsed distinctions between fugitive and stateless personhood that have marked black Americans, indigenous persons, and other subjects of punitive jurisprudence in the hemisphere, Jones’s narrators identify themselves as refugees and fugitives who redefine sanctuary as a practice, not a place. In doing so, Jones’s narrators construct multiple extra-legal literary personae and other alternative modes of storytelling and archival memory that challenge the cultural logics underpinning taxonomies of legal personhood.

This chapter focuses on the Haitian Revolution and its brief moment of impact in France’s National Assembly. During the early portions of the Revolution, Haitian revolutionaries – former slaves – asserted their claims to the ‘rights of man’ in strong and direct ways, following up on their successful military action with petitions to the new government in France. For a moment in the midst of the two revolutions, the idea of the ‘rights of man’ reached across boundaries of race and geography, as the National Assembly voted to end slavery in Haiti and other colonies. These thin trans-Atlantic bonds did not last long, however, as the rights of man were overridden by racism, violence and, finally, the resumption of slavery. The flow of ideas back to the metropole was thus profoundly incomplete. The chapter illustrates, moreover, the dangers in interpreting the Haitian Revolution too strongly through these French terminologies. The Haitian revolutionaries who adopted the language of the rights of man were themselves few in number and unrepresentative. A far larger portion of the Haitian population identified much more strongly with a different kind of universal practice, one lacking its own theoretical canon: the process of marronage, of running away from enslaving and domineering social structures to live on their own terms in any way possible.

This chapter explores how Christianization became an indispensable tool for Afro-Amerindian rebels seeking political legitimacy and continued autonomy on the frontiers of the Spanish empire and within an African diasporic world. Focusing on the period 1577–1617, it considers how clerical intervention and the discourse of religious conversion shaped colonization over time by looking at the case of Esmeraldas maroons on the coast of early colonial Ecuador. By analyzing aspects of marronage and maroon societies in Spanish America, it elucidates how the colonial state resorted to Christian missionizing and conversion as part and parcel of its pacification campaign. It shows that the Esmeraldas maroons deftly navigated both religious intervention and the discourse of Christian conversion in order to situate themselves as the legitimate lords of Esmeraldas.

This chapter examines the question of imperial jurisdiction over fugitive slaves in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century. In particular, it considers how slavery intersected with the Spanish Crown's efforts to consolidate its jurisdiction and how the creation of legal spheres of enslavement and freedom helped to legitimate imperial sovereignty. After discussing the Spanish Crown's royal decrees related to intercolonial marronage, the chapter cites the importance of enslaved Africans as a commodity in intercolonial commerce and the Crown's attempts to stem the contraband slave trade as well as the perennial labor shortage. It then explores how authorities wrestled with the problems of compensation and restitution wherever fugitives crossed political boundaries. It also highlights several dimensions of legal pluralism that played out in the slave societies in the Caribbean with respect to inter-imperial marronage. Finally, it explains how the interests of fugitive slaves combined with those of the Spanish Crown to influence the empire's legal order.