The Spirit of Marronage

An inspiring Maroon political, cultural and spiritual awakening is taking place across the Caribbean and Atlantic world, spanning from Belize to Suriname, Brazil to Sierra Leone. This landmark book reveals women's leadership in this underestimated transnational political movement and resurgent sacred project. Highlighting nuanced intersectional approaches, this collection of essays by leading scholars and participants in this field show how Maroons have transcended legal erasure, resisted forced removal, countered gendered violence, and stopped resource extraction, to reclaim their place as Indigenous peoples in a world-making project of liberation and steadfast self-determination.

Prof. Dr. Mimi Sheller

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

“The Spirit of Marronage” (re)presents a remarkable synergy of voices, perspectives, and positionalities, all of which are committed to the embodied praxis and politics of bridge- and movement-building for co-creating the cognitive, spiritual and material conditions for new horizons of re-existence. This book convinces readers that Maroons and the lived principles of Marronage are no longer just the inspiration for appropriated metaphors, or the focus of locally mapped ethnographies, or topics confined to the footnotes of texts probing the histories and legacies of Afrikan descendants and Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Abla Yala, Améfrica. Usually presumed to be disparate, even when articulated through alliances and overlapping struggles, this instructive volume unsettles those conventions in its critical expansion of the meanings and groundings of “Maroon” and “Indigenous” as salient categories in the discourses and practices of international human rights. In its challenging reinterpretations and collaborations, this provocative book is a model for working toward the decolonization of the social relations, power dynamics, intellectual yields and practical applications of research, social analysis and knowledge creation.

Dr. Faye V. Harrison

Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Editor of “Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation”

Author of “Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age”

This path-breaking volume brings together decades of work on Caribbean Maroon and Indigenous peoples and their communities. With special attention to women’s lives, it interrogates the contentious issues related to definitions of indigeneity, arguing for a wider, more inclusive understanding. It provides a basis for new conversations about peoples and communities which have been ignored in this region for far too long.

Rhoda Reddock

The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus