Freedom as marronage

Description

Part I: On slavery, agency, and freedom. Introduction ; The disavowal of slave agency -- Part II: Slave theorists of freedom. Comparative freedom and the flight from slavery ; Sovereign marronage and its others ; Sociogenic marronage in a slave revolution -- Part III: Freedom as marronage in late modernity. Marronage between past and future ; Afterword: Why marronage still matters.;"What is the opposite of freedom? In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Crucial to his investigation is the concept of marronage--a form of slave escape that was an important aspect of Caribbean and Latin American slave systems. Examining this overlooked phenomenon--one of action from slavery and toward freedom--he deepens our understanding of freedom itself and the origin of our political ideals. Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space--that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite."--Publisher's Web site.