The Morphology of Marronage

Abstract

A number of texts have addressed desires for and iterations of freedom throughout the Black diaspora. Although conceptualizations of freedom are often employed and interrogated in critical scholarship, less attention is given to the landscapes onto which politics are performed. This article draws from scholarship in Black and Ethnic Studies along with Geography to argue that the ability of select fugitive groups to obtain forms of spatial autonomy is reliant on their ability to seek, find, and settle within difficult and seemingly uninhabitable landscapes. Using marronage as a conceptual tool, I posit that quests for freedom through fugitivity have often relied on the topographic and geomorphologic traits of natural environments. To illustrate marronage as a landscape of political possibility, I close with examples from the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam to demonstrate how across time and space, devalued landscapes have serviced subterfuge and provided sustenance for long-suffering communities. Key Words: geomorphology, landscape, marronage, uneven geographical development, value.

许多文章中都探讨了散居在外的犹太黑人对自由的渴望和心路历程。虽然自由的概念化被很多批判性学术文章引用和质疑，但却很少有人关注政治所处的环境。本文通过研究黑人、种族以及地理学得出这样的结论：对于选择逃亡的群体而言，获得空间自主形式的能力，取决于其在困难和似乎不宜居的环境中寻找、发现和定居的能力。借助于“外逃非裔美国人”这一概念，我认为，通过逃亡寻求自由的结果，往往取决于自然环境的地形和地貌特征。为了阐明外逃非裔美国人是具有政治可能性的环境，我在文中最后还提供了来自美国、墨西哥和越南的例子，展示恶化的环境如何跨越时间和空间，为长期受苦的社区提供生存所需的物资。关键词：地貌、环境、外逃非裔美国人、地理发展不平衡、价值。

En cierto número de escritos se ha abordado el tema del afán y deseo reiterado de libertad a lo largo de la historia de la diáspora Negra. Si bien las conceptualizaciones de libertad a menudo son usadas e interrogadas en la erudición crítica, poca es la atención que se dispensa a los paisajes en los cuales pueden ser evidenciadas. Este artículo se apoya en la erudición de los Estudios Negros y Étnicos junto con la de la Geografía para argüir que la capacidad de grupos selectos de fugitivos para lograr formas de autonomía espacial está supeditada a su capacidad de buscar y encontrar paisajes difíciles y aparentemente inhabitables donde asentarse. Utilizando el término palenque (o asentamiento cimarrón) como una herramienta conceptual, planteo que la búsqueda de libertad por medio de la evasión a menudo ha estado condicionada por los rasgos topográficos y geomorfológicos de los entornos naturales. Para ilustrar el palenque como un paisaje de posibilidad política, termino con ejemplos de los Estados Unidos, México y Vietnam, para demostrar cómo a través del tiempo y el espacio, los paisajes menos apetecibles han servido de refugio y proporcionado sustento a comunidades sometidas a sufrimiento continuo. Palabras clave: desarrollo geográfico desigual, geomorfología, paisaje, palenque, valor.

Freedom for African-descendant people has been a concern of Black Studies since its inception in the 1960s (Biondi 2012). Since this time, and no doubt before, scholars (Kelley 2002; Hartman and Wilderson 2003; Andrews 2004; Hartman 2007; Roberts 2015; Davis 2016; Heynen 2016), revolutionaries (Haywood 1948; Obadele 1970; Newton 1973; Cabral 1979), and organizers (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963; White 2017; Black Lives Matter 2019; McCutcheon 2019) have addressed this desire throughout the Black diaspora—how it has been sought, acquired, maintained, and thwarted. Less attention has been given to the landscapes onto which freedom dreams are sutured and, furthermore, how the characteristics of certain landscapes might make them amenable to those seeking to escape racial oppression, gender-based violence, and capitalist exploitation (C. Boggs 1977; G. L. Boggs 1998; Akuno 2014, 2017).

With this article, I make a geographic pivot within this conversation toward what has been labeled by Bledsoe (2017) as “the spatial figure of the maroon community” (30). This article addresses the areal factors of freedom through the concept of marronage (i.e., the creation of a society by fugitive slaves beyond bondage and exploitation). It is my position that broadening the spatiality and temporality of discussions on marronage beyond the colonial Caribbean and antebellum United States might aid besieged communities in the present. Furthermore, I assert that the collective practice of marronage is incumbent on the existence of unruly environments and that analyzing these environments could inform the study of social movements for land and territory. Moreover, I suggest that the collective practice of marronage is incumbent on the existence of landscapes open to marronage—environments that might offer the space and allegiance necessary to create new cultures, new societies, and new worlds antithetical to the exploitative aims of the agents of capitalism.

In discussing freedom as marronage, I center the term landscape, because it best speaks to the initial (de)valuations of an area assigned by those subscribing to capitalist and colonial systems of value (see Said 1979). Some of the earliest studies of landscapes were topographic observations of landforms and human life (Sauer [1925] 1963; Meinig 1979; Livingstone 1992; Olwig 1996). The work of Sauer is indicative of this human and environmental focus. Groomed in a time during which the mandates of environmental determinism consumed the discipline of Geography, Sauer’s scholarship grew to refute this marginalizing trend (Leighly 1963; Sauer 1971, 1981). In his hallmark study, “The Morphology of Landscape,” Sauer ([1925] 1963) rejected environmental determinism by taking account of the interrelation between human and nature, particularly anthropogenic commands made of lands for the advancement of human life.

Despite the centrality of landscapes to global projections of power (e.g., slavery, capitalism, and colonialism), geographers have been most concerned with artistic representations of European landscapes from the (pre)modern and postmodern eras (Cosgrove 1985; Mitchell 1994; Cosgrove 2004; Minca 2007; Della Dora 2013), not to mention representations of North American landscapes (Meinig 1978; Schein 1993; Olwig 2003). Of particular interest to scholars has been the depiction of the shift from the collective use of the commons to individual ownership in English landscape art and the role of geometry and mapmakers in this process (Cosgrove 1988; Harley 1988). Yet, although this spatial transition came alongside the rise of capitalism in Europe (Federici 2004) and colonialism abroad (Robinson 1983), too few researchers have studied the politics inherent in landscape paintings (Bermingham 1994) and the spatial implications of contemporary colonial (Fields 2011) and racial (Schein 2006) projects.

This article shifts the focus of landscape studies to those whose lives have been altered by oppressive regimes. Hence, a central argument of this article is that persecuted communities throughout the world have benefited from converting natural environments into landscapes of marronage. Landscapes of marronage are those difficult terrains that marginalized, hunted, and exploited people have made habitable—areas where communities have taken a desire for liberation and merged it with an ignored and undervalued environment to gain liberties in opposition to repressive administrations. This coinage borrows from the historical significance of maroons in the Americas as communities created, more often than not, in austere landscapes on the outskirts of plantation societies. These repurposed landscapes were the result of humans’ encampment within a defiant environment, a centering of the use value of said environment, and the spatial imaginaries and praxes of people seeking asylum.

In the following section, I address some topographic characteristics of landscapes of marronage through literature on maroon societies in the Americas. My attempt is to illustrate how unruly environments, which are often “space[s] less fully subjugated to capital than others,” were and remain essential to the practice of marronage (Malm 2018, 3). Engagement with the concept of unruliness is important for a number of reasons. First, it supports my argument that certain environmental properties were integral to marronage and the creation of maroon communities. Second, it serves as a conceptual tether with which I tie the spatial and political practices of formerly enslaved African fugitives to those of colonized people in other parts of the world. Third, centering unruliness facilitates a bridging of scholarship in Black and Ethnic Studies with research in Geography, thereby amplifying Lowe’s (2015) call for a multiregional and transdisciplinary approach to the study of (post)colonial histories.

Freedom as Marronage

Marronage is both a fugitive movement from bondage and the replication of an alternative world(view). As a practice, marronage is known to take two forms—petit marronage and grand marronage. The former refers to truancy and temporary acts of fugitivity, brief escapes from the plantation to get a time of respite, to flee punishment, or to see a loved one perhaps enslaved elsewhere (Price 1996). These acts were typically performed within the confines of the plantocracy. What differentiates grand marronage from mere flight and escape is that it resulted in the production of an alternative geography, often in the form of a settlement prevailing on the peripheries of the plantocracy (Price 1996). This article builds on and extends the concept of grand marronage.

Although the literature on marronage spans a variety of geographical and geopolitical contexts, much of it is situated within the era of formal racial slavery (Hall 1985; Bilby 2002; Sayers 2008, 2015; Baram 2012; Kemper 2014; Fuentes 2016). There lies potential in extrapolating and reapplying the benefits of this practice beyond these terrains and temporalities. As discussed by Roberts (2015) in a recent text on the philosophical benefits of marronage, its “temporality is oriented toward the present as well as the future” (7). Informed by his perspective on the subject, I suggest that marronage is a transtemporal concept and practice born within specific conjunctures within the modern and postmodern eras.

My articulation of marronage stretches this concept twice. First, I place literature on marronage in conversation with that on the intersection of nature and society to ground my assertion that the existence of maroon communities was and remains incumbent on human relations with particular physical geographies. Second, I extend marronage conceptually and temporally beyond the embodied realities of racial slavery in the Western Hemisphere. In so doing, I propose that marronage is not only evident in an African fugitive’s flight from bondage. The practice of marronage exists in other forms, spaces, and conditions of control as various repressed groups have made attempts to retain autonomy in the face of countless spatial, laborious, libidinal, and ideological forms of capture commensurate with capitalism’s global expressions. In other words, I am concerned with how a spatial analytic of marronage as a practice dependent on ignored landscapes within and beyond the Americas can influence the production of Black political movements and people’s movements more broadly.

Methodological Considerations

This study is inspired by a growing body of literature on the international connections between political officials and exploitative industries (Connolly 2014; P. J. Hudson 2017; Woods 2017). In particular, I draw from Lowe’s (2015) intricate, imaginative, and highly instructive text, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Therein, she argued that the racialization and exploitation of enslaved Africans and indentured colonial servants were intertwined through the variety of commodities they produced and the forced labor regimes in which they persisted. Lowe (2015) stated that studies of these overlapping colonial histories are unfinished:

There is work on indentured labor systems utilizing Europeans and Africans, with some attention to the role of Chinese and Indian migrations to the Americas, but there is less work that examines European colonial conquest and the complex history and survival of native indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, and scarcely any that considers the connections, relations, and mixings among the histories of Asian, African, and indigenous peoples in the Americas. (2)

In short, academics have been confined by a world regional approach to the study of the geographic and political contributions of persecuted communities. Inspired by Lowe’s (2015) study, I seek to make intersections between how enslaved and colonized people—and those in postslave and postcolonial contexts—have resisted the expropriation tactics of capitalist and colonial regimes through a discussion of their engagements with local environments. As a result, I find commonality in modes of struggle and conditions of political possibility across subject positions. To this end, this study brings to the fore the “contradictions of colonial slavery” to demonstrate how spatial and political challenges to enslavement and other forms of (post)colonial capture have emerged throughout parts of the world across time (Lowe 2015, 48). By addressing marronage as an analytic and a liberatory practice located in the not-so-distant past and extending beyond the condition of Black subjectivity, I hope to open “a space for a different kind of knowing” through a weaving of the optics and praxes of Black subjects in the Americas with that of communities in other parts of the world (Lowe 2015, 99). What follows is an engagement with studies of marronage within racial slavery to foreground the spatial inherent of this survival strategy.

A Function of Topography

Despite the spatialities of marronage, in much of the scholarship on this subject, spatial necessities subtend what is often discussed as an embodied and cultural practice of resistance (Weik 1997; van Andel and Havinga 2008; Ruysschaert et al. 2009; van Andel 2010; Kemper 2014; van Andel, van der Velden, and Reijers 2016; van’t Klooster, van Andel, and Reis 2016; van’t Klooster et al. 2018). As a result, within these studies landscapes of marronage are subtly suggested (Aptheker 1939; Wade 1964; Norton and Espenshade 2007; Sayers, Burke, and Henry 2007; Ejstrud 2008; Sayers 2008, 2015; Lockley and Doddington 2012; Lockley 2015; Malm 2018; Pargas 2018).

It has been said that maroons cultivated “freedom on their own terms within a demarcated social space that allows for the enactment of subversive speech acts, gestures, and social practices antithetical to the ideals of enslaving agents” (Roberts 2015, 5). Roberts’s (2015) reference to a social space and Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) work on the subject give credence to the significance of physical geographies to the development of this unique society. In an early study of marronage, the noted historian Aptheker (1939) stated, “The mountainous, forested, and swampy regions … appear to have been the favorite haunts of these Black Robin Hoods” (167). In the Lesser Antilles, according to Hall (1985), “the viability of such communities … was a function of topography. Natural barriers such as jungle, swamp, and hardly penetrable mountain fastnesses enabled maroon communities to develop in isolation and successfully defend themselves against attack” (481). What resounds within these and other studies of marronage, and yet has gone underinterrogated, is that without the existence of challenging, unoccupied, and unruly environments, fugitive slaves might have never become maroons.

In an edited volume that deals with the agency of environments under colonialism, Krishnan, Pastore, and Temple (2015) defined unruly environments as “places difficult to control and categorize, whether choked with vegetation, submerged underwater, or encased in concrete” (5). The essays within that collection draw on histories of former colonial landscapes in Africa and South Asia to further disrupt the commonly accepted nature–society binary that contributes to the separation of human from nonhuman beings. Authors in this collection argued that natural environments and the animals therein (e.g., leopards and tigers) were never fully tamed by colonial developmental schemes. In its totality, the text is an influential discussion of how “the vicissitude of nature” disrupted imperial designs and, for that matter, those of communities native to unruled landscapes (Krishnan, Pastore, and Temple 2015, 6). The text also contributes to an established body of literature on the human as nature (Haraway 1990, 2008; Latour 1993; Conty 2018), the subhuman as nature (Wynter 1971; Gossett 2017; Puar 2017; Wright 2018), and animate and inanimate objects as forces of nature (Whatmore 2002; Braun 2005; Khan 2009; Bennett 2010).

Despite the proposed agency of various environmental actors, in this text it is said that natural areas were often corralled for the purposes of capital and colonial expansion. Nag (2015) acknowledged how ecotourism developed in the Meghalaya State during India’s colonial era due to the region’s torrential rains. Temple (2015) indicated how once drained, the marshlands of Algeria aided in the development of French imperialism. Sutter (2015) described the Panama Canal as a “ten-mile-wide strip of imperial modernity” (19). In a separate, yet no less germane publication, Walter Rodney, Guyana’s martyred Marxist historian, discussed the advancements that Dutch enslavers made on indigenous ingenuity to transform Guyana’s coastal habitat. To protect plantations from flooding and to further “the humanization of the Guyanese coastal environment” (Rodney 1981, 3), polders were established throughout the countryside in the name of “sea defense” (Rodney 1981, 2). Although these works provide insights into the use of challenging settings under colonial control, other than the tacit mention of the unforeseen contributions embedded within unruly environments, they fall short of explaining nature’s anticapitalist and anticolonial capacities (see Last 2015).

Krishnan, Pastore, and Temple (2015) posited, “But lest we forget unruliness can also create a space for opportunity and enterprise. Even as unruliness frustrates us, it can also enrich the human condition” (7). Thus, frustration is not the lone outcome of an environment’s unruly materiality. This is but one form, to borrow from Yeh (2013), of “value-coding” landscapes that are terrestrially and technologically inaccessible as well as environmentally and economically devalued in the eyes of those ascribing to capitalist notions of value (18). Building on the foundational work of van Schendel (2002a, 2002b) and Scott (2009), Yeh asserted that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) usurpation of Tibet for the territorial expansion of the Chinese nation-state coincided with an imparting of values on people and place. The PRC’s system of valuation was based on the extent to which Tibetans and their terrains were seen as developed. She stated, “In this national value-coding, there is a dialectical relationship between the quality of peoples and places, in which the characteristics of place are seen to inhere in the persons associated with them” (Yeh 2013, 117). She was not the only examiner to make such an argument regarding the external values placed on colonized people and their environments. Researchers of territories north and south of the Himalayan Mountains have illuminated the views of (post)colonial governments concerning the features of challenging landscapes and the people who have made them habitable (Skaria 1997, 1999; Scott 1998; van Schendel 2002a, 2002b; Scott 2009; Hussain 2015; Gergan 2016).¹ Next, I discuss the relationship of uneven geographical development to unruliness and its role in the practice of marronage.

On Uneven Geographical Development

It is advantageous to read nature’s unruliness alongside discussions of uneven geographical development, a concept elaborated² within the field of Geography by Smith ([1984] 2008) and Harvey (2005a, 2005b). For a challenging yet capacious environment to have existed beyond the designs of enslavers and colonizers is the result, in part, of its unruliness and the fact that such environments were deemed undesirable and inaccessible. Smith ([1984] 2008) argued that the infusion of capital, and I would add care and concern, into certain communities at the expense of others is deliberate.

For Smith ([1984] 2008), uneven geographical development is the condition for and price of doing business within a capitalist economy. A result of this unnatural selection is that certain areas are chosen for development and others aberration. Stated otherwise, development and underdevelopment are constitutive. Moreover, he suggested that uneven geographical development is the expression of a tension between use and exchange value; “it is possible to see the uneven development of capitalism as the geographical expression of the more fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange-value,” he wrote (Smith [1984] 2008, 6). The extent to which a landscape is legible within a capitalist system of development is one aspect of this contradiction, to which Wynter (1971) referred in her discussion of the “indigenous plot values” that rivaled the market interests of Caribbean plantocracies (102). This contradiction might also be read, as Gidwani and Reddy (2011) suggested, as the tension between a Lockean understanding of rational and irrational use—the former being what grounds civil society and the latter, marronage. Without the “proper” logic and “appropriate” use, landscapes are said to linger (even if they are being put to use) as waste. Here, Sauer’s ([1925] 1963) argument concerning “habitat value” is salient:

Geography is distinctly anthropocentric, in the sense of value or use of the earth to man. We are interested in that part of the areal scene that concerns us as human beings because we are part of it, live with it, are limited by it, and modify it. Thus we select those qualities of landscape in particular that are or may be of use to us. (325)

Sauer’s research is absolved of a critical analysis of the role of structures of power (e.g., antiBlackness, colonialism, capitalism, or the Anthropocene) in landscape valuation, alteration, and abandonment. Nor does his stance regarding the dialectical relationship between man and nature consider the various arrangements of (wo)man (e.g., Black, subaltern, indigenous) and nature (e.g., unruly environments) or the use of landscapes for liberatory means. Nevertheless, his conceptualization of the morphology of landscape as an interrelation of natural and cultural components remains foundational to the geography of landscapes.

Another aspect of uneven geographical development is that it facilitates the production of landscapes that capitalists and colonists might consider deficient geographies: arid plains, steep mountains, boggy swamps, and dense woods. Because geographies deemed deficient are often challenging to access and inhabit, their habitat value remains low and, thus, they are not yet considered legible landscapes—suburbs, plantations, dog parks, what have you. As untapped resources, landscapes that are today ignored are for capitalists but commodities-in-waiting³ (see Gidwani and Maringanti 2016). Second, and this is central to the practice of uneven geographical development, the extent to which these commodities-in-waiting are accessed is tied to technological advancements, legal amendments, and perhaps even developments in capitalists’ accumulation-oriented spatial imaginaries (see Wilson 2000). The longer it takes to muster innovative technology, to amend laws, or to suspend political representation, the more difficult it could be to mine a mountaintop, to drain a swamp, or to eradicate a particularly invasive species, whether flora or fauna. Thus, a central component of a deficient geography,⁴ and a key distinction between it and an unruly environment, is that it is an unruly environment overlaid with a capitalist (or colonial) spatial imaginary.

Racializing Uneven Geographical Development

In his discussion of uneven geographical development, Harvey (2005b) stated, “[The] theory of uneven geographical development needs further development” (55). I agree. Despite periodic references to colonialism (Harvey 2005a, 2010, 2018) and issues of race (Smith 1996), neither Harvey nor Smith, in the corpus of their highly influential research, interrogated the centrality of white supremacy to capitalism’s advent and its global articulations. For the spatial fix(ation) through which it is suggested that capitalism endures (Harvey 2001) coincides with a racial fix(ation) (Bledsoe and Wright 2018). Without this intersectional stance, one is left to believe that some of the contradictions of a capitalist economy (e.g., uneven geographical development, houselessness, and poverty) are the result of race-neutral economic processes. This is an oversight within the works of these instrumental scholars.

The intersection of race and capitalism is one of many arguments made in Robinson’s (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Robinson helps one see the primacy of racial categorization and racial hierarchy in the historical production of capitalism in Europe and the transfer of this racialized hierarchy and system of valuation across the Atlantic where it was reanimated to account for indigenous and Black subjects. Thus, capitalist development, particularly in the postcolonial and postslave contexts in which it has found enumerable circulations, is a racialized practice. Therefore, rather than speak of the production of landscapes of marronage as simply a result of uneven geographical development, as did Sayers (2015), I suggest an adoption of the term racialized uneven development.⁵

Racialized uneven development results in the production of deficient geographies. Whether physical, social, or cultural, these landscapes are often seen to lack the intrinsic value and charisma (see Sayers 2015) to entice investors and to spur development. Hence, it is not uncommon for these spaces and the people who inhabit them to remain neglected, feared, and despised for extended periods of time. As is often the case, it is not until these spaces fall within what Lipsitz (2007) called a “white spatial imaginary” that they are exposed to development and individual ownership (13–14). Said Smith ([1984] 2008), in his discussion of westward U.S. expansion, “As the wilderness was tamed, external nature took on a less threatening appearance” (20). In other words, a landscape’s legibility (see Scott 1998) and its values, particularly in the United States, have often been tied to the state and civil society’s ability to control it and to dispel the people who inhabit it.

Despite this reality, physical geographies made deficient through racialized uneven development might serve another purpose and exist as more than “landscapes of capitalism” (Smith [1984] 2008, 205). As evident by scholarship on Black geographies (Woods 1998; McKittrick and Woods 2007; McKittrick 2011, 2013; Bledsoe 2015; McCutcheon 2015, 2019; Shabazz 2015; Bledsoe et al. 2017; Woods 2017; Wright and Herman 2017; Ramirez 2019; Reese 2019), in addition to becoming vectors of capitalist developmental schemes, unruly environments—the material fount of deficient geographies—could also challenge the demands made on them by deviant human actors.

In the edited volume Unruly Environments, Nag (2015) described how the soggy, rain-soaked terrain of Cherrapunji “threatened soldiers’ health and challenged efforts at imperial administration” (25). Temple (2015) explained how the indiscriminate, mosquito-infested marshlands of Algeria posed considerable obstacles to the health and administrative designs of French colonists. “Soldiers and settlers alike fell victim to their malarial airs,” he wrote (Temple 2015, 12). Extending the observations made by these scholars, I desire to do more than expose how colonial, enslaving, and, for that matter, state forces have found themselves “struggling against nature” in their quests for racial, political-economic, and spatial dominance (Yeh 2013, 62).

The conceptualization of unruly environments is useful in thinking not just of the agency of things and nature as a conscript of capitalist and colonialist development. The notion of unruliness might also aid one in thinking about how spaces deemed deficient might serve the needs of subjugated communities. If reevaluated, they could offer answers to a question posed by Smith ([1984] 2008): “What is the geography of anti-capitalism?” (3). I find political import in how communities extrapolate use value from unruly environments and while within them design (see Escobar 2018) marronage as an assemblage (see Khan 2009) with and of political possibilities.

Moving forward, I engage the political histories of revolutionary movements to illustrate how unruly environments have served as landscapes of recalcitrance wherein people have created alternative lifeways in opposition to the permutations of racial capitalism in the Americas and abroad. I offer three examples of human–environment confluences to consider what could be learned and perhaps replicated from communities that have initiated “historically contingent social isolation” in unruly environments with and within which they formed landscapes of marronage (Sayers 2015, 39).⁶

In Lieu of Capture

Swamp

Throughout the southern United States and colonies across the Caribbean, enslaved Africans took to various environments in search of freedom. One ecology was the swamp. Through the colonial gaze the swamp was destitute and undesirable. Sayers (2015) suggested that negative judgments regarding the Great Dismal Swamp were tied to the landscape’s perceived lack of exchange value within colonial America’s burgeoning “capitalistic enslavement mode of production” (55). This was land illegible within the spatial imaginary of the participants of the plantocracy. As such, it had yet to be trekked, parceled, planted, and valued:

For the moment, it can be said that to those operating within the capitalistic political-economic and social fields of the world beyond it, the swamp became defined as a nonproductive, cursed element of the landscape: capital had not yet compelled the transformation of the swamp, the swamp yielded little profit to anyone, and its particular natural character had little appeal to most people living outside of its boundaries. (Sayers 2015, 40)

Seen as untamed, uninhabitable, and valueless terrain, swamps were, for maroons, areas of restive freedom—a space where they could escape a spatial and economic mode of production based on chattel slavery and its inherent exploitations (i.e., dehumanization, natal alienation, and gratuitous violence). According to Sayers (2015), “The Great Dismal Swamp landscape itself, a product of uneven geographical development, Diasporic exile, and material alienation, was absolutely necessary in the actualization of that counterexilic and revolutionary critique, that effective autexousian praxis of thousands of people,” whether African or Indigenous inhabits (208).⁷ In other words, the spatialization of antivalue (see Harvey 2018) exemplified by the Great Dismal Swamp was a key ingredient in the production of this landscape of marronage.

The unruly waters of the swamp lacked spatial coherence and were a locale unrecognizable to citizens of the United and Confederate States of America. Thus, for maroons it was a terrain of resistance beyond the racial, spatial, political, and economic rationale of a world built and maintained by chattel slavery. The swamp-turned-landscape of marronage was a place born of self-imposed exile, ingenuity, and, to quote Sayers (2015) once more, “a system’s spatial and political-economic blind spots and margins” (8). With and within this natural landscape, fugitives to enslavement developed a synergy with the environment through which they were able to persist in a space viewed as void of value and civility.

The existence of landscapes of marronage indicates the pains to which maroons went to live a life beyond the controlling logics, logistics, and landscapes of civil society and the slate that a space like the swamp provided for the production of this polity and its politics. Yet, swamps are but one landscape in which marronage has taken hold. In other parts of the world, as was the case for formerly enslaved fugitives across the Americas (Aptheker 1939; Hall 1985; Sayers, Burke, and Henry 2007; Sayers 2008; Lockley and Doddington 2012; Lockley 2015; Bledsoe 2017), mountains have served as barriers against assault and exploitation as well as bridges leading to the formation of new lifeways.

Mountain

For more than two decades, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (Zapatista or EZLN) has inhabited the highlands of southern Mexico.⁸ They came to persist in the mountains, in part, because the state of Mexico and local planters negated their humanity and, by association, their spatiality. According to Subcomandante Insurgente Moíses, “Before the Zapatista Army for National Liberation was created, we indigenous peoples of Chiapas didn’t exist for the capitalist system. It didn’t consider us people, we weren’t human. It considered us less than trash” (EZLN 2016, 59). Fincas were the only lands that finqueros and latifundistas saw as valuable. As a result, say the Zapatistas, “we were forgotten” (EZLN 2016, 60). “Where we live, that is, in the mountainous regions, in the hills, was designated as a reserve. They didn’t know indigenous communities lived in a forested reserve, in the Montes Azules Biosphere. That is, capitalism didn’t know anything about us because no one took our existence into account; we didn’t exist for them” (EZLN 2016, 60). The EZLN took this lapse in time during which capitalists took no interest in them and their mountainous terrain to organize a way of life in concert with the environment. Unregistered as a capitalist cartography, the undervalued, rugged mountain provided the EZLN with the necessary time to create another world (view) based on new values, new social relations, and a re-engendered politics of the land.

The significance of the Zapatistas’ politics of marronage is not only tied to the fact that it respatializes a practice that has been consigned to the actions of errant enslaved Africans. In the highlands of southern Mexico, the EZLN created a collective society informed by the intersectional politics practiced by indigenous women, reorienting what has been a highly gendered act of resistance. In his analysis of grand marronage, Hall (1985) stated, “Maroons from the Danish West Indies, as from Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil, were preponderantly male” (479–80). This was despite the fact that in the nineteenth century the enslaved population of urban centers like Christiansted, St. Croix (Hall 1985), and Bridgetown, Barbados (Fuentes 2016), was majority women.⁹

Although Zapatistas had been able to live in unison with the land and without assistance from Mexican administrators and government-sponsored clinics and schools, their unsullied respite was temporary. For capitalists to perform their duty of value creation and increased profits, they must improve their rate and spaces of accumulation (see Harvey 2004), often through developments in technology and reinterpretations of laws. Montes Azules Biosphere, the protected reserve where the Zapatista subsist, and its natural resources are now desired for extractive industries, for the expansion of capital. To further and hasten their extraction of natural resources, politicians and heads of industry “have changed the laws to benefit the capitalist system” (EZLN 2016, 4), to facilitate the flow of capital through the protected reserve and the Zapatistas’ elevated territory:

In the last 20 years we can now see the capitalist economy inside the communities because now those above have started to take an interest in them. It’s not an interest in the communities themselves but an interest in where they live, where we live—and where we once lived. … Now they’ve realized that in the mountains and hills there’s another commodity available to them, and as has already been mentioned here, that commodity is nature’s wealth. (EZLN 2016, 61)

Through their analysis, the Zapatistas indicate that a result of advancements in technologies of excavation and legal duplicity is the dispossession of land and the dispersal of Zapatista and non-Zapatista inhabitants; essentially, racialized uneven development. Said the Zapatistas, “So now they’ve started to organize themselves so they can evict us from the very same places they had pushed and ordered us into” (EZLN 2016, 61). This statement and the overarching analyses provided by the Zapatistas suggest that the devaluation of indigenous inhabitants of southern Mexico is commensurate with the continued exploitation of the landscapes of this region. In my final unit, I look to the use of tunnel systems by North Vietnamese rebels within the Cu Chi region of South Vietnam to complete my illustration of the many expressions of landscapes of marronage.

Tunnel

According to the authors of The Tunnels of Cu Chi (Mangold and Penycate 1985), Vietnamese villagers began developing tunnel systems in the mostly rural regions of South Vietnam as a means of communication between neighboring families. Said Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh of the People’s Army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, to understand the origin of the tunnels, one had first to understand the rural culture of the Vietnamese people and their intimate relationship to the land as a life-giving source; “They are something very Vietnamese … and one must understand what the relationship is between the Vietnamese peasant and the earth. … Without that, then everything here … is without real meaning” (Mangold and Penycate 1985, 66–67). The tunnels were a key resource for the Viet Minh during its struggle for independence against French colonial forces. They were also essential to North Vietnamese insurgents’ ability to withstand years of assault by the U.S. military.

Mangold and Penycate (1985) suggested that there was a collective spatial imaginary that produced this patchwork of passages: “No single engineer designed this vast labyrinth … the tunnels evolved as the natural response of a poorly equipped and mainly local guerilla army to mid-twentieth century technological warfare. Aircrafts, bombs, artillery, and chemicals obliged the Viet Cong to live and fight underground” (30). In an attempt to lessen the casualties wrought by Vietnamese guerilla forces familiar with the tropical terrain of South Vietnam, the U.S. military instituted an intense aerial assault known as Operation Crimp (Mangold and Penycate 1985). This concerted bombing effort was meant to defoliate the terrain that had given guerilla fighters sustenance and a modicum of safety.

The tunnels of Cu Chi not only provided protection from aerial assaults; they were a space for the production of a communal way of life in less than desirable conditions. For years, entire families, battalions, and communities subsisted in a subterranean life. Although dug out of necessity and expanded as a means of military strategy, the ability of troops to subsist beneath the lands of Vietnam was also a result of the region’s unique geomorphologic traits. The land in which they lived was composed of a soil composite known as laterite, a form of clay embedded with iron deposits. Pliable in the wet season and nearly impenetrable when dry, the clay, once engineered, provided a sturdy and steel-like hideout for North Vietnamese guerilla fighters stationed in the South. According to Olson and Morton (2017), in a study published in the Open Journal of Soil Science, “The nature and properties of the Old Alluvium soils were key to the soil tunnels being so resilient. Soils located in Old Alluvium terraces had high levels of clay and iron” (34). Particular to the Cu Chi District of southern Vietnam, the Old Alluvium soils acquired their composition through the leaching of iron deposits from subsurface soils during the region’s wet season.

The end result of the combination of the Vietnamese people’s spatial and military imaginary with the soil’s natural geomorphologic traits was what Mangold and Penycate (1985) referred to as “the protective clay of the Cu Chi district” (20). Soldiers lived in these channels carrying out the everyday practices of civilian and military life: sleeping, cooking, eating, and strategizing. In essence, they created a subterranean world within a treacherous, defoliated, and dejected landscape, all in the name of self-determination.

Conclusion

In this article I extended the concept of marronage in two ways. First, I argued that marronage is a practice existing beyond the temporal and geographic realms of chattel slavery. I demonstrated such by applying the concept to the fugitive movements and alternative social and political worlds of the Zapatista in southern Mexico and North Vietnam insurgents in southern Vietnam. Attempts by these groups to evade state and imperial forces’ racially motivated enclosures and the accumulation and commodification of their local resources evoked comparisons to the tactics of avoidance and place-making carried out by enslaved Africans in the United States and the Caribbean.

Second, I suggested that a practice of marronage is incumbent on the presence of deficient geographies, oft-ignored spaces viewed as lacking in exchange value that fugitive groups converted into landscapes of marronage. I also called for a reconceptualization of these spaces. If viewed with a critical lens, these locations can be marshaled into present-day struggles for self-determination, spatial autonomy, and just futures in the United States and abroad. For a quest for self-determination lies not only within an understanding that freedom is a constant struggle (Davis 2016) but that freedom requires a landscape and that political struggles must change or adopt tested political methods to meet the challenges posed by threats across space and time.

Moreover, it is important to discern that the designation and use of deficient geographies or landscapes of marronage are determined by the logics applied to them. Thus, a singular physical geography can—based on the (be)holder—be a deficient geography and a landscape of marronage. Examples of this dichotomous understanding, use, and valuation of landscapes are present in the ongoing struggle over the repopulation and renewal of Black and Latinx communities in cities across the United States. As is often the case, the renewal of community spaces has stood in stark opposition to how current residents use and value them.

For example, in 2014 Latinx youth in San Francisco’s Mission District challenged Dropbox employees over the appropriate use of a public soccer field (Bhattacharjee, Chuang, and Smith 2014). Around this time, Black artists in Houston posed alternative uses for spaces in the city’s rapidly gentrifying Third Ward neighborhood (Wright and Herman 2017). In 2019, Black residents of Washington, DC, spawned #DontMuteDC in opposition to a white gentrifier’s complaints against an area business’s airing of go-go music, the city’s sonic signifier (Lang 2019). Instances such as these are why residents might bristle at the possibility of the repair of community spaces via public–private partnerships, relationships that Stein (2019) argued have contributed to gentrification and the “rise of the real estate state” (5).

Furthermore, one should consider that the conversion of a deficient geography into a landscape of marronage does not discount its potential to be reverted into an area of accumulation. In fact, the “improper” praxes that I argue produce a landscape of marronage might also contribute to its commodification. I offer two examples, again through the analogy of gentrification. First, the spatial legitimization of an unruly environment by a repressed or underserved community could facilitate a shift in the spatial imaginary of potential patrons, as it becomes evident that a once-ignored ecology has habitat value and, thus, investment potential. In urban settings, once a previously decried landscape is deemed capable of habitation, developers, municipal leaders, and the gentry (i.e., the proper residential subjects) all acknowledge the potential value of a deficient geography. Second, the devalued state of this long-neglected landscape and its ballooning rent gap render it a prime location for the infusion of human and finance capital (Smith 1979). Whether in the metropolis or the metropole, spaces inhabited by undervalued, racialized, and immigrant communities are repeatedly imagined as areas in need of cleansing and future conduits for capital (Danewid 2019).

Hartman (2007) addressed the temporal trajectory of landscapes of marronage in the final chapter of Lose Your Mother, wherein she sketched the threats ad infinitum to stateless people who fled African mercenaries and states in West Africa: “Out there beyond the wall were hostile states, a constant stream of raiders, and breakaway princes seeking to establish dominion in new lands. The bloodletting of the modern world allowed for no havens or safe places” (227). An embattled reality was part of “the terms of continued existence” in post-contact West Africa (Hartman 2007, 227).

Despite these challenges, it is important to devote resources to promoting marronage in the present. Viewing marronage as more than a relic of the past might help communities and scholars escape the double bind of thinking of freedom as a long-fought-for goal existing in the distant future and the belief that once acquired it is a permanent condition of being. Thus, a landscape of marronage is perhaps most productive when understood as a refuge, where in a particular space and time a group might settle and synthesize an understanding of their condition based on practices developed in place. From this position, communities might come to an understanding that although a polity and politics might be developed with and within an area, both can (in the face of ongoing threats) transcend place by remaining true to a fluid and communally defined ethics (see Courtheyn 2016).

Finally, viewing marronage in the present as a place produced within deficient geographies could have bearing on where movements for self-determination are likely to occur. If it is accepted that marronage can occur in various landscapes, regions, and temporalities, there is the potential to incite marronage today in undervalued rural and urban settings. Doing so will not only dislodge this spatial practice from the regionalized annals of U.S. history. It could foster a logic through which organizers and academics activate dejected landscapes for the betterment of besieged communities.

Acknowledgments

This article was improved through conversations with friends: Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Asha Best, Orisanmi Burton, Ziyana Lategan, and Kristen Maye. I also received supportive comments on a draft of this article presented before the departments of Geography at the University of Minnesota and Florida State University in addition to the departments of Geography and Planning and Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Furthermore, I have a debt of gratitude to the North Carolina–based Workshop for Intercommunal Study for introducing me to the political history of the EZLN, to The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History for our marronage reading group, as well as to the people of Detroit and Jackson, whose perseverance in the face of antiBlack austerity measures opened my eyes to the potential for marronage in the present. Finally, this article would not have come to fruition without the aid of the anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Willie Jamaal Wright

WILLIE JAMAAL WRIGHT is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Geography and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854. E-mail: [email protected]. His research draws on Geography and Black Studies to assess the spatial practices and productions of Black diasporan communities in urban contexts. His current studies include theorizing Black urbanisms and a monograph on the spatial and political legacies of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika.

Notes

1 Although the crux of this article analyzes values alternative to capitalism, the works of Yeh (2013) and others (van Schendel 2002a; Scott 2009; Kligman 2011; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; Coulthard 2014) indicate that it is not only capitalists who have imposed their will and systems of value on unruly natures. States, whether grounded in a capitalist, socialist, or settler colonial political economy (e.g., the Soviet Union’s process of collectivization, the People’s Republic of China’s Great Leap Forward, and Canada’s multicultural capitalism), are provocateurs of landscape change and purveyors of value creation.

2 Conversations about the racial and regional implications of uneven geographical development took place decades before the works of Smith and Harvey became canons within the annals of geographic thought. According to Peck (2017), the genealogy of this term dates back to the Soviet intellectual and political figure Leon Trotsky. Furthermore, discussions between Frank, Amin, and Wallerstein on dependency theory are another example of other interests in uneven geographical development.

3 This phrase is an adaptation of Wilderson’s reference to the Black subject in the United States as a “prison slave-in-waiting” (Wilderson 2003a, 2003b, 18). Wilderson suggested that as less-than-human subjects, Black people are ontologically malleable and, thus, subject to varying forms of capture (e.g., from chattel slave to prison slave) within civil society. For him, it is a structural reality that persists despite ascensions that occur at the level of individual performance.

4 Deficient geographies might draw comparisons to sacrifice zones (Lerner 2010) and shadow places (Plumwood 2008). Whereas the latter two concepts point toward the production of toxified and forgotten communities due to racial zoning (Lerner 2010; Endres 2012; Cottle 2013; Oliveira and Hecht 2016; Little 2017; Reinert 2018), in addition to colonial, corporate, and state abuse (Plumwood 2008), the concept of deficient geographies addresses the logical, environmental, and embodied deficiencies applied to spaces prior to (and that impede) investment, manipulation, and misuse. All of this is not to say that a sacrifice zone or shadow place cannot be a deficient geography. Unlike deficient geographies, however, they are frequently considered the dregs of a capitalist economy, not the matter with which it is (re)created.

5 There is commonality between racialized uneven development and what Heynen (2019) called “uneven racial development” (2). Rather than developed through Dubois’s notion of abolition democracy, as is Heynen’s (2019) conceptualization, racialized uneven development is driven, in part, by the critiques of Wilderson, whose work elucidates society’s antiBlack animus (Wilderson 2003a, 2003b). Thus, Wilderson suggested not the need for an abolition ecology (see Heynen 2019)—which might valorize and operate within the U.S. system of liberal democracy—but an end to civil society’s master–slave relation through “a total end of the world” (Wilderson 2014, 12). Moreover, Heynen’s (2019) conceptual deployment is fixed within the bounds of urban political ecology and “a city like Atlanta” (11), whereas my own applies to rural and urban areas where racialized devaluations of people and place occur.

6 There is evidence of marronage in feminist histories of European conquest and enclosure. Hartman (2007) stated, “Predatory states produced migrants and refugees as well as slaves. Those on the run sought asylum in out-of-the-way places that offered suitable defense like rocky hillsides or they built walled towns or they hid in caves or they relocated to lagoons or mountainous terrain or anywhere else that appeared to be impervious to horsemen and raiding armies” (226). Federici’s (2004) Caliban and the Witch highlights marronage as a tactic employed against the enclosure of land and liberty during late antiquity. She stated, “By the 4th century, in the Roman territories and the new Germanic states, many landlords had to grant the slaves the right to have a plot of land and a family of their own, in order to stem their revolts, and prevent their flight to the ‘bush’ where maroon communities were forming at the margins of the empire” (Federici 2004, 23).

7 Although the Great Dismal Swamp is readily associated with the flight of African fugitives, Sayers (2015) suggested that prior to and during the early years of European settler colonialism, members of the Chesapeake and Tuscarora tribes used the swamp to protect their cultural and spiritual traditions.

8 Although the Zapatista locate their struggle for autonomy within a centuries-long battle against settler colonial capitalism, those who identify as “Zapatista” came into being within a particular place and time.

9 It has been argued that due to a freedom of mobility associated with gendered labor practices, men were more likely to be hired out to work off the plantation, increasing their chances of escape (Wade 1964; J. B. Hudson 2002; O’Donovan 2007). Such was the case with Frederick Douglass (Douglass 1997) and Abraham Galloway (Celcelski 2012), formerly enslaved men whose skilled maritime labor and proximity to ports aided them in spiriting away to the North.