FUGITIVITIES: QUILOMBOS, MAROONS, BUSINENGE, PALENQUES, COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES AND THEIR LIMITATIONS
Across the Americas and beyond, Maroons communities are generally understood to be descendants of enslaved peoples who fled from captivity, establishing themselves in relative spatial, political and sociocultural autonomy from surrounding (post-)colonial societies, yet in counterpoint to them. As an assemblage of acts of resistance, marronage offers a rich tapestry of counterhegemony, insularity, and complex colonial relationships shaped by even more complex geographies. In the Black Atlantic, marronage has become a pliable symbol, used not only to depict Afro-Atlantic modernity (providing some of the earliest examples of post-colonial governmentality and of historical counterpoints to Euro-American self-fashioning) but also to intervene in historiographies that make broad assumptions of the reach and scale of colonial powers.
Experiences of Maroons, Quilombolas, Cimarrones, Palenqueros, Businenge and similar collectives vary greatly, in terms of historical formation, contemporary ways of living, and their political, ecological and cosmological engagements. Owing, in part, to this wide variation, comparative empirical approaches to Maroon communities (particularly across national borders) are both relatively few and far between and can become projects of erasure, exclusion, and epistemic injustice. Furthermore, the nature of Maroon scholarship has shifted significantly over the last fifty years. Early Maroon scholars focused intently on ethnogenesis and historical formation. These footprints, and the narrow intellectual footpaths they created, ironically trained and fixed marronage in the reticles of a colonial aperture that has sought to understand precisely how such an expansive group has evaded colonial oversight. As such, marronage in print has created an artefactual gaze of Maroons in frozen flight.
More recently, scholarship around Black Geographies and Black Ecologies, based on earlier intellectual and political traditions, has begun to reengage marronage conceptually as evidence of the power that can be generated when a) blackness exists in furtive ways and b) fugitivity is leveraged to produce territoriality, identity, and security. This slowing and accelerating of marronage — as history and as political concept — has left Maroon scholarship increasingly divorced from the contemporary pulse of the myriad, daily lives of Maroon communities. The arrhythmia of disengaged scholarship is not simply a problem for the orchestration of intellectual endeavours, it shows up in the material world as a kind of percussive violence; leaching obtuseness and unnavigability across the political, social, and geographic relationships that Maroon leaders, activists, and communities seek to have with each other.
This panel seeks to work at tempo and within the pulse of respective Maroon communities to understand how similarities and differences can be woven into an even richer tapestry of action. We are concerned with how contemporary Maroons understand their shared and divergent histories, and contemporary and future contributions to political mobilisation and transformations, touching on crucial local and global themes such as women’s political and economic leadership, countercolonial ecological systems, cooptation into resource extraction, and climate change adaptation. We invite contributions from Maroon/Quilombola researchers and/or research partners who are interested in contributing to the generation of contemporary discussions about the material conditions of Maroon communities across the Americas and the Caribbean.
