Exorcizing Property: Marronage as a Practice of Freedom

This paper considers marronage as a historical and theoretical embodiment of freedom within a political economy structured by self-propriety. Placing the escape from slavery within the a Lockean account of property, I show how enslavement depends on a vision of self-mastery that mirrored the enclosure of land. Escape from slavery was not becoming a self-possessed individual but depended upon relationships between oneself and the more-than-human world, especially the connection between wild and cultivated land. To think about marronage as a practice of freedom not predicated upon self-propriety, I offer exorcism as a way of imagining liberation from property. This account not only avoids the limitations of theories of dispossession, but also allows for an understanding of freedom capacious enough to include humans and more-than-humans in the sphere of political consideration.