Political theorists, philosophers, and scholars of religion have not sufficiently examined how maroons have historically shaped and articulated visions of freedom. Notable exceptions—such as political theorist Neil Roberts’ groundbreaking theorization of freedom as marronage in the context of the Haitian Revolution [1]—have largely overlooked marronage in North America, likely due to the long-standing assumption that maroon communities there never reached a politically significant scale. However, recent archaeological excavations in the Great Dismal Swamp of northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia challenge this assumption, providing compelling evidence of large-scale, long-term maroon communities. These discoveries have prompted archaeologists and historians to reassess the dominant narratives surrounding these communities. [2]
In this presentation, I examine the promises and limitations of theorizing freedom as marronage in the context of the Great Dismal Swamp. I propose three key concepts—flight, holding ground, and illegibility—as foundational to developing a critical lexicon for this theorization.
For over two centuries, enslaved people fled their plantations and work sites, forming hidden maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp, where they envisioned and enacted freedom beyond bondage. Some communities, deep within the swamp, constructed raised homes, built water catchment pits, cleared land for subsistence farming, and erected defensive structures, persisting for decades—possibly centuries. These maroon communities never engaged in large-scale armed conflict or signed treaties to force recognition and gain political legitimacy in the eyes of colonizers. Instead, they sought distance from the planter aristocracy, evaded institutional record-keepers, and pursued freedom beyond state recognition.
Flight is constitutive of marronage in the Dismal Swamp and beyond. Evoking movement and intentionality, this concept orients us towards what the philosopher Thomas Nail described as kino-politics. [3] If, as Nail argues, “the power of the sovereign is first and foremost to move and make stop,” then maroons, by taking flight from slavery, undermined the dominant plantation politics of mobility and exposed alternative ways of moving through the landscape. A critical consideration of flight also necessarily centers the body in motion, recognizing that human bodies are primary units through which other scales of power are re/produced. This invites reflection on the vexed relationships between freedom, mobility, and bodily autonomy.
The concept of holding ground, as I use it here, is developed by the geographer Celeste Winston. Winston defines it as a “care-filled practice of placemaking that transgresses dominant geographies” and a “refusal to yield, bend, or compromise in the face of attack or affront.” [4] Deep in the swamp, maroons rejected dominant environmental logics of mastery and property, instead cultivating alternative practices of stewardship and land usage that are foundational to what J.T. Roane has described as the “Black commons.” [5] Holding ground as a theoretical lens invites us to examine the limits of planter sovereignty and the politics of liberatory place-making in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and beyond.
Illegibility, as I employ it here, draws from the work of the anthropologist and political theorist James C. Scott, who describes how marginalized communities evade state regimes of knowledge and control. [6] Illegibility foregrounds the extensive efforts to render the movements of enslaved people discernible through the plantation surveillance apparatus while also highlighting the porousness of this apparatus and the ways fugitives and maroons eluded it. This concept helps us appreciate how the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp largely avoided plantation record books, colonial and antebellum court documents, and other archival regimes used by dominant institutions—challenging historians who must rely on these sources.
I will conclude by briefly reflecting on the limits and possibilities of expanding this critical lexicon to engage more fully with maroon articulations of freedom in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Endnotes:
[1] Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
[2] The leading archeologist studying the Dismal Swamp is Daniel O. Sayers. He presents his most comprehensive view of his findings in A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (University of Florida Press, 2014). The first, and currently only, manuscript length work on Dismal Swamp Maroons by a historian is J. Brent Morris’ Dismal Freedom: A History of the Great Dismal Swamp (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
[3] Thomas Nail, Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
[4] Celeste Winston, How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon geographies and a World Beyond Policing (Duke University Press, 2023).
[5] J.T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons,” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 20, no. 3 (2018).
[6] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed(Yale University Press, 1998).
Political theorists, philosophers, and scholars of religion have not sufficiently examined how maroons have historically shaped and articulated visions of freedom. Notable exceptions—such as political theorist Neil Roberts’ groundbreaking theorization of freedom as marronage in the context of the Haitian Revolution—have largely overlooked marronage in North America, likely due to the long-standing assumption that maroon communities there never reached a politically significant scale. However, recent archaeological excavations in the Great Dismal Swamp of northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia challenge this assumption, providing compelling evidence of large-scale, long-term maroon communities. These discoveries have prompted archaeologists and historians to reassess the dominant narratives surrounding these communities. In this presentation, I examine the promises and limitations of theorizing freedom as marronage in the context of the Great Dismal Swamp. I propose three key concepts—flight, holding ground, and illegibility—as foundational to developing a critical lexicon for this theorization.