Freedom as Fugitivity and Marronage

This paper will argue that a fuller understanding of Black fugitivity is achieved when regarding its sonic properties. That sound, I contend, can be located at the site of the Black sermon. I therefore intend to theorize the phenomenon of call-and-response that participates in the Black fugitive sounds heard on any given Sunday in Black churches across the United States. The sounds that inhabit the sanctuary during the sermon form what I name as the endophonic counterwitness that designates Black churches’ sanctuaries as a ‘within-space’ where the gathered congregation maroons themselves weekly. My argument attends to the ways that the sound objects—the preacher’s voice, the Hammond organ, and the gathered congregation—fuse together in the sanctuaries in Black churches forming a fugitive sound. 

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.

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.

This paper examines how the migration of Old Colony Mennonites to Maya territory in southeastern Mexico represents a form of fugitivity that simultaneously resists and reproduces colonial logics, drawing on religious myths to fuel eschatological visions of utopia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with both Mennonite and Maya communities, this paper focuses on Mennonite narrations of their relationship with land and scriptural texts to understand how Mennonites envision “a good place.” The paper explores the contradictions that arise as Mennonite communities attempt to enshrine particular freedoms through separatist communities while participating in agro-industrial systems that damage ecosystems and neighboring Indigenous communities. We interpret these contradictions through a reading of analogous visions of utopia in Mennonite communities and in the book of Revelation. In doing so, we aim to complicate binary understandings of resistance and complicity to power structures, suggesting that utopic visions of freedom can simultaneously offer possibilities for liberation and justifications of harm.