See below for the colloquium info. Looking forward to seeing you all on Thursday.
Time: 4:30-5:45 pm on April 1
Speaker: Dr. Alex A. Moulton (
CV)
Institution: Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee
Title: Maroon Atlas: Cartography, Fugitive Production of Space, and Black Geographies of Colonial Jamaica
Abstract: Just as soon as European colonists had organized a plantation system of agrarian production and wealth accumulation to be driven by enslaved Black labor
in the so-called ‘New World’, Maroons started to mount an offensive. Maroons were Africans who escaped enslavement on the plantation and established settlements in the rugged interior or hard to reach places—such as tropical forests and swamps of the Americas.
Maroonage then, was a socio-spatial response to slavery and a counter-hegemonic assertion and enactment of Black humanity. Much work has focused on the triumphs of the Maroons against colonial powers which often led colonial administrations to pursue peace
treaties with the ‘rebels. Almost as voluminous is the work problematizing the Maroons, particularly regarding their agreement to terms in peace treaties that hindered broad Black freedom in the colonial era. Considerably less attention has been placed on
Maroon geographies—the spatial politics and outcomes of maroonage. Using the Jamaican Maroons as a case study, I draw on field research and archival research to suggest what a Maroon Atlas might look like. Reading Maroon negotiation of space, through Black
Geographies, I map maroonage as fugitive mode of producing space that can be grasped through the shifting cartographic representations of Jamaica. In doing so I move away from prescriptive evaluations of the Maroons, to plotting the dynamic between maroonage
and socio-ecological transformations. Focusing on geographies of maroonage clarifies the spatial sensibilities and agency of Maroons. Through a Maroon atlas we can connect discontiguous physical and symbolic locations of Black counter-cultural life in the
Black Atlantic.