[electric] NOTES: Freedom as Marronage

ELECTRIC NOTES:

Delve into the praxis, theories, and stories of both Black and Indigenous American authors.

Neil Roberts’ Freedom as Marronage “answers two central and related questions: What are some distinct concepts of freedom emerging out of the experience of slavery? What important insights does analyzing the relationship between slavery and freedom provide to political theorists?” (3).

One of its most interesting contributions is its argument that slavery and freedom were not inert categories or states: “Much of the extant literature frames unfreedom and freedom as inherently inert conditions. this body of writing posits slavery as a state that agents are locked into without any mobility, and it describes freedom as a motionless attribute of agents who are simply in a condition antithetical to the unfree” (9).

The argument that neither slavery nor freedom were “motionless” reminds us that to be free or unfree required continual reinforcement. For instance, enslavement was continually reinforced through legislation like Partus Sequitur Ventrum (that which is born follows the womb), slave patrols, and the 3/5ths compromise that reduced human “chattel” to 3/5ths of a person. Marronage, on the other hand, was also an act that had to be constantly reinforced to maintain freedom. Maroons had to create independent, covert communities to maintain their freedom and deter their return to the state/condition of slavery/unfreedom.

In Freedom as Marronage, slavery and marronage are interdependent, fluid categories wherein maroons could fluctuate between states of relative freedom either through petit marronage or grand marronage. Marronage is not just a state or condition, but an act of flight. Roberts states: “Marronage is a multidimensional, constant act of flight that involves what I ascertain to be four interrelated pillars: distance, movement, property, and purpose” (9).

The multidimensional characteristics of marronage manifests in Roberts’ assertion that marronage can be both experienced and envisioned because “Flight can be both real and imagined” and Freedom is not a place; it is a state of being” (11). It is Roberts’ position that all enslaved people had the capacity for marronage, particularly a capacity to envision or imagine freedom.

Through Freedom as Marronage, readers can interpret marronage as a practice, an envisioning, and a theoretical framework for understanding the freedom-making practices of enslaved peoples and their descendants.

Get Freedom as Marronage here.