Geographies of maroonage in the Americas

Slavery & Abolition, 2011

During the nineteenth century, migration was a central feature of black life in the USA. The combined forces of 'local' slave trading, slaveholder relocation, and colonisation removed African Americans from their homes and further dispersed them throughout the cultural contact zones of the American tropics and Black Atlantic. Insofar as they have been linked to one another, these migrations have been situated as aspects of the African or Black Diasporas, yet the migrants' letters reveal identities secured to US homes and homelands, suggesting that their self-conceptions as Americans, albeit enslaved, formerly enslaved or slave-descended, should qualify or even supersede any description of them as members of the Black or African diasporic communities. No aspect of African American life in the United States has been untouched by the great migrations-by the contrapuntal narrative of movement and place.

H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews

Tempo, 2017

The slave trade within the Americas, after the initial disembarkation of African captives in the New World, has received scant attention from historians, especially before the abolition of the transatlantic traffic. This article examines such intra-American trafficking as an introduction to the digital project Final Passages: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which aims to document evidence of slave voyages throughout the New World. This article does not provide statistics on this internal slave trade, as ongoing research will deliver new data. Instead, we consolidate qualitative knowledge about these intercolonial slave routes. As the article focuses on the era prior to British and U.S. abolition of the transatlantic trade (1807-1808), we leave out the nineteenth-century domestic slave trades in the United States and Brazil to focus on survivors of the Atlantic crossing who endured subsequent forced movement within the Americas. O tráfico interno de escravos nas Américas, depois do desembarque inicial de africanos cativos no Novo Mundo, tem recebido pouca atenção dos historia-dores, especialmente antes da abolição do tráfico transa-tlântico. Este artigo examina o tráfico interno nas Améri-cas como uma introdução ao projeto digital Final Passages: The intra-American Slave Trade database, que pretende registrar evidências de viagens de escravos pelo Novo Mundo. Como a pesquisa em curso trará novos dados, este artigo não fornece estatísticas sobre o tráfico interno. Por sua vez, consolidamos um conhecimento qualitativo sobre essas rotas intercoloniais de escravos. Como o artigo se concentra no período anterior à abolição britânica e nor-te-americana do tráfico transatlântico (1807-1808), não abordamos o tráfico doméstico de escravos nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil para focarmos nos sobreviventes da travessia atlântica, forçados a deslocamentos no interior das Américas.

Springer eBooks, 2023

Historical journal of Massachusetts, 2016

Editor's Introduction: This article explores the many ways that West Africans arrived in New England by way of the British American Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than being shipped directly from Africa, Africans who arrived in New England were usually the "residue" or leftover human cargo from these Guinea voyages. Small numbers of Africans were shipped with the rum and sugar sent back to New England as part of the provisions and carrying trade. Africans who arrived in New England by these circuitous migrations were the captive cousins of the hundreds of thousands of Africans who labored on Caribbean sugar plantations. They shared ethnic origin, language, cultural, and spiritual beliefs and practices as well as kinship connections. This article argues that the propensity to resist enslavement often found in the Caribbean was also true of enslaved Africans in New England.Historians agree that most enslaved Africans who lived in coloni...

Antipode, 2020

Since the birth of the Transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans have exploited their geographic circumstances to obtain liberation, effectively transforming them into maroons. However, geographies of marronage have disproportionately investigated terrestrial landscapes to understand how self‐liberated Africans made life in the Atlantic world. Turning our attention to the sea, I use geospatial analyses to map ocean currents and explore routes of passage for maritime maroons from the island of St. Croix (Ay Ay). Mapping this oceanic cartography of Black fugitivity provides renewed insight into the ways in which maroons used oceanic literacy to actualise their quest for freedom and their experiences in their new homes.

Current Anthropology

This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology. On October 12-18, 2018, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research hosted its 158th symposium at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal. The symposium gathered scholars from different disciplinary and geographical homes and was convened by Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw. It was designed to be an intellectual challenge to academic traditions within anthropology and offer models of what anthropology could become in order to have greater impact in policy, public culture, and action. It was intended to engage an uncomfortable and painful past whose buried memories continue to linger in the present. To do that, it was structured to accommodate a broad spectrum of cultural sensibilities and political subjectivities that lay bare the positionality of the researcher. The ultimate goal was to provoke, revisit, and redirect debates on Atlantic slavery and modernity across racial, cultural, class, and gender, as well as methodological and theoretical, boundaries for the twenty-first century and beyond. Following the statement of the goals and orientations of the symposium, all participants were asked to prepare papers that were circulated prior to the meeting. Paper presentations during the meeting were followed by thematic focus group discussions. The history of Atlantic slavery is tightly linked to that of European colonization of the rest of the world that went hand in hand with the production of Eurocentric knowledge. European global voyages, ca. 1400, were largely motivated by commerce and later colonization that meant economic and political control over new resources, territories, and their inhabitants. That colonial expansion was built on unequal relations legitimized by Eurocentric views of the world in general, elevating European over different others, particularly Black Africans and Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere. Physiological, biological, and phenotypical differences were translated into discriminating racial, ethnic, and national distinctions that were naturalized first on the basis of religion and physical appearance and later by way of anthropological and historical knowledge that, by the nineteenth century, became a powerful medium for representing and controlling non-European others (Cooper 2005; McClintock 1995; O'Brien 2010; Pratt 1992; Schlanger and Taylor 2012; Stoler 2002a). Eurocentric knowledge was strategically mobilized to intrude, search, analyze, dissect, and ultimately consume Black bodies according to European demands, needs, and standards (Curran 2011). Anthropological gaze born of modernity is a direct outcome of that colonial history that continued to reproduce canonized discourses and representations that locked people of African descent and Indigenous communities of the Western Hemisphere into the imagination of others (Mudimbe 1988, 1994; O'Brien 2010; Trouillot 2003). Hence, it is critical to interrogate how these legacies infiltrated the core methodological and theoretical foundations of anthropological discourses (

ERLACS

2022

The anthropological study of the African Diaspora is steeped in questions of identity. Slaves, people ripped from their homes and placed in a new socio-political and natural environment, had to create new identities; ones that were an amalgam of (predominantly) West African, Western European, and indigenous American cultures. This paper expands on these concepts by examining how the resistance of maroons, or escaped slaves, allowed for a unique series of cultures to be created during this ethnically concerning period of history. With anarchist theory and archaeological data from sites in the Caribbean and South America, I present a new image of these maroon communities: once where simply creating new lifeways was an everyday act of resistance. I conclude with an affirmation that these people were not only victims, but active, socially complex, and ingenuitive individuals who, through immense adversity, created lasting and successful communities.