"I ran from it and was still in it": Maroon Ecology in a Neoliberal World

Maroon ecologies are proliferating in the environmental humanities. For historians, geographers, literary critics, and religious studies scholars, marronage—enslaved persons escaping to the bush to establish alternative communities beyond the plantation economy—represents a site from which to think the intermingling of human and other-than-human resistance to domination. This way of thinking with marronage is useful for considering forms of agency and liberation that stretch our political and ecological thinking beyond political economies of self-possession and self-mastery, but how do we think about marronage in a neoliberal world from which escape does not appear obviously possible. Put another way, how can marronage help us to imagine human and other-than-human freedom when the property regime—in which freedom is individual self-possession—operates not only through top-down implementation of political and economic policy but also through our individual actions, including our attempts to extricate ourself from the pervasiveness of capitalism? Is marronage simply another back-to-the-land movement whose participants picked up texts from the Black Radical Tradition instead of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog or Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America? This paper argues that marronage can provide a helpful paradigm for understanding human and other-than-human freedom in a neoliberal world, but only insofar as its resistance to the plantation economic and ecological regime is understood as a response to accounts of freedom rooted in property.

Lockean understandings of humans having “a Property in [their] own Person” and of mixing their labor with land in the act of property accumulation, ground many neoliberal accounts of freedom. But the problematic conception of freedom as the ability to sell one’s labor in a market economy focuses only on the human side of the equation. A property-based account of freedom also transforms one’s relationship with the other-than-human world such that land can only signify property in potentia or in actuality. Not only does this constrain one’s relationship to the other-than-human world as either owner or respecter of the ownership of another, but it also prevents recognition of the labor carried out by the land. Human labor is Locke’s rationale for why land may have more or less value, but this distinction—between human labor and nature’s idleness—becomes a logic that devalues not only the other-than-human world but also certain so-called “idle” classes of humanity. And, with the introduction of a money economy, it is the ownership of capital that demonstrates ultimate value, not any actual labor carried out.

Marronage as an ecological imaginary offers the possibility of disrupting an account of freedom rooted in ownership not simply because it marks a refusal of the plantation regime that transforms humans into property. Marronage also offers a positive account of freedom rooted in the land, but not simply a romanticized practice of small-farm agriculture or of immersion into sublime wildernesses. Rather, it is the entanglement of human and other-than-human, of agriculture and wildness, of labor and idleness that gives marronage its radical potency. To show this, I draw on thinkers like Robert Wedderburn and Sylvia Wynter, who see revolutionary potential in the provision grounds—the land granted by plantation owners to the enslaved for subsistence—to undo the confinements of private property and provide a site for human liberation. I also consider how wild landscapes—often jungles, mountains, and swamps—play a liberatory role in separating maroon life from the plantation regime. It is it not the dichotomy between cultivated and wild, worked and unworked land that makes marronage an alternative to the property regime. Rather, it is the dialectic relationship between these sites that makes it possible for a conception of freedom unbound from capitalism’s value-system based on labor and ownership.

I conclude the paper by considering the challenge of imagining marronage in the context of neoliberalism. If thinkers like Keri Day and Adam Kotsko are correct, then one of the greatest challenges of neoliberalism is its ubiquity, including its ability to permeate into our subjectivities. Our willingness to assess ourselves by our self-ownership, especially our relationship to our labor, leaves us in a place where even our efforts to resist or refuse omnipresent market logics are evaluated by this calculus. If, as Wendy Brown puts it, neoliberalism represents “the transformation of political problems into individual problems with market solutions,” marronage must offer us a way to imagine freedom in truly political spaces.⁠1 I suggest that a dialectic between the provision grounds and jungle, between labor and idleness—a relationality in which both humans and other-than-humans are bound up in this form of politics—is what marronage offers. If freedom can be indexed to this—a form of political existence that makes human and other-than-human solidarity possible—then marronage can offer us what we really need: not an escape from the neoliberal world but a ground from which to grow its abolition.

1 Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization,” Political Theory 34.6 (2006): 703.