New histories of marronage in the Anglo-Atlantic world and early North America

Document Type

Article

Date of Original Version

5-1-2020

Abstract

This essay surveys the scholarship of marronage, the most pervasive form of fugitive slave community formation, resistance, negotiation, and enslaver accommodation in the history of the Atlantic world. It begins with a brief survey of the subject's historiographic roots, with particular emphasis on its foundational definition as slave resistance and rebellion; on scholarly debates of the grand/petit marronage binary; and on the validity and definitions of maroon identity, forged by processes of ethnogenesis and grounded in maroon communities, past and present. The essay then centers on recent histories of marronage in the Caribbean, the Global South, and in early North America. In doing so, it seeks to draw out explicit thematic connections otherwise implicit in new maroon studies. The essay closes with a brief mention of forthcoming works that, informed by extant maroon studies, examine the challenges contemporary maroon communities face and that signal present-day maroon descended communities' contributions to an increasingly globalizing world.

Publication Title, e.g., Journal

History Compass

Volume

18

Issue

5

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