Exorcizing Property: Marronage as a Practice of Freedom

Marronage is having a moment in the humanities. Its historical, literary, ecological, economic, and political legacies inspire widespread reflection upon not simply the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation but also the trajectories that extend into the present like policing, prisons, neocolonialism, and the so-called plantationocene. In a world of omnipresent forces of domination like global capitalism and national security states, and global crises like anthropogenic climate change, marronage might seem an odd framework. Why think about escape in situations where flight is not obviously possible? In this paper, I consider marronage within its original context as emancipation from the regime of property and extend this framing to consider its relevance for thinking about freedom in a world of self-propriety. I argue that the freedom represented by marronage should not be thought of as a reassertion of self-possession or a rejection of self-ownership through dispossession, but might be imagined instead as a form of exorcism, a liberation from a dominating form of possession. This freedom, I suggest, is pertinent not only because it imagines a form of subjectivity and agency that goes beyond the terms of order provided by capitalism’s account of the self, but also because it makes space for the human and more-than-human to participate in the liberation that marronage embodies.

To understand the shape of marronage’s form of resistance, it is critical to place the phenomenon within the property regime of the plantation economy. To do this, I examine John Locke’s account of property especially focussing on its account of self-propriety or the ability to have property in one’s person. While this idea did not originate in Locke, he establishes the idea of God’s ownership of creatures and of the human creature’s derivative ownership of the self as the foundations for transforming land into property. Indeed, land not only is the primary thing to be accumulated as property but becomes the model for understanding self propriety; like enclosed land, the individual can be walled-off, secured against outside influence or use, and so individual rights are thus immune to vicissitudes of the external world. Though Locke himself was critical of slavery and believed self-propriety was inalienable, his account of accumulation—mixing one’s labor with the earth to acquire it as property—became an influential way to understand chattel slavery especially insofar as enslaved indigenous and African peoples were not considered fully human. Slavery was not a violation of human self-propriety because the enslaved person was more akin to the land than to the human person. Slavery, then, was not the alienation of one’s property in the self, but rather the mixing of white labor with unproductive land to turn it into property.

It is this property arrangement from which maroons escaped. But though they emancipated themselves from the plantation economy, they could not carry on within its account of self-ownership that continued to regard them as property even in their absence. As maroons formed communities in inhospitable landscapes like mountaintops, swamps, or dense jungles, they carved out social spaces that refused the arrangements of the property regime. This is not to say that their economic arrangements were proto-communist. I am simply suggesting that they could not act as fully-fledged self-owning humans because they continued to occupy a world that refused them that status. One way of seeing this distinctive form of life, is that maroons drew on the impenetrability of the landscape to protect themselves from being re-enslaved. What Sylviane Diouf calls “hinterland marronage” was not so much about distance from the plantation, but about the inaccessibility of maroon communities from the plantation economy brought about through strategic interaction with wild landscapes. Upending Locke’s understanding of uncultivated space as unproductive “waste,” maroons draw on the land as a source of security.

Lest we overly romanticize marronage’s relationship with wilderness (already a fraught category as William Cronon and others have shown), it is important to recognize that maroons brought practices of the plantation with them into the bush. Writers like Robert Wedderburn and Sylvia Wynter observed how maroons transplanted the practices of the provision grounds—agricultural spaces allowed the enslaved to cultivate their own food—into the landscapes of marronage. So it is not simply the wild landscape but rather a dialectic between cultivate and uncultivated space that made maroon life possible. This, I think, signals a further upending of the property economy. Through mixing of cultivated and wild spaces, the form of subjectivity and agency established through enclosure is undermined.

In the final section of this paper, I think about how to theorize the freedom enacted through marronage. While critical theory has turned to dispossession as a way of rejecting the liberal, capitalist notion of self-mastery and self-ownership, dispossession implies a prior self-possession not afforded to the enslaved. Instead of dispossession, I offer exorcism as a model for thinking about liberation from possession, both the reality of being possessed by others experienced by the enslaved and the broader possession of humans and other-than-humans in capitalist economics. I draw on Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick’s understanding of the demonic—what the latter describes as “a process that is hinged on uncertainty and nonlinearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future”—in order to think about the exorcism of property that takes place in and through marronage. Upending Christian colonial associations of wild places with devils, I argue that maroon landscapes are only demonic from the perspective of the plantation because marronage represents a form of freedom that cannot be metabolized by a political economy grounded in self-ownership.

What marronage affects is a liberation from the real spaces of possession: the plantation and the broader property regime. This exorcizing of the forces of self-ownership has ramifications not only for accounts of human freedom but also for the freedom of the more-than-human world. If self-propriety was indexed to the human, then liberation from possession makes it possible to begin to imagine a freedom for all those previously excluded from the sphere of political consideration.