Session Abstract

During the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Africans throughout the Atlantic world forged dynamic socio-political identities in response to endemic violence and chaos.  Never members of static “tribes” or fixed Diaspora communities, Africans and their descendents in the Americas created and contested new discourses of political legitimacy and moral citizenship (Lonsdale 1994) that addressed emerging forms of capital accumulation and economic inequity as well as the growing prevalence of violence and danger (Shaw 2002). For many of those who fled enslavement in the Americas, the challenges of creating a cohesive maroon community from disparate elements reflected a continuity of experiences in Africa as well as local adaptations.  Building on recent trends in African and African Diasporic scholarship (Young 2007, Hawthorne 2010), in this panel we address the political dynamism of maroon communities as elements of a broader African Atlantic system. Arguing that maroonage was a crucial component of political behavior on both sides of the Atlantic, we strive to address the tensions and debates internal to these fugitive communities.

The study of African identity in the Atlantic world during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade has been characterized by a focus on culture and the presumption that ethnic groups can be located within contemporary geographies despite radical historical shifts and changing notions of affinities (Soares 2000).  However, in the past few years, scholars have called for an examination of “the politics of practical behavior” (Brown 2008). The working assumption is that groups’, communities’, and individuals’ political strategies shaped their demands, goals, and definitions. Through such an approach, scholars can transcend questions of the degree of “Africanness” of Diasporic practices to instead consider seriously internal community debates about political legitimacy and ethical conduct that forged meaningful claims of identity in the Black Atlantic. Rather than viewing maroon communities as isolated vestiges of Africa, our panel instead engages the histories of fugitives on either side of the Atlantic through their relationships with and roles in forming broader regional and trans-Atlantic political systems.

We address the local and Atlantic politics of identity in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in maroon communities in Angola, Peru, Colombia, and the United States, seeking to unravel the meanings of the terms by which African people and their descendents in the Americas described themselves. Krug examines the affiliation of Kisama identity with political and militarized opposition to slavery amongst fugitives in both Angola and Colombia. O’Toole explores the case of a heterogeneous maroon settlement in Peru to understand how claims to West Central African identities may have articulated shared political goals. Maris-Wolf demonstrates that maroon identity and semi-autonomous communities in North America could be forged through the practical behavior of fugitives in settled areas as well as more removed locations. These papers approach terms of identity within maroon communities as claims about political and ethical conduct rather than as markers of origin and argue that they can help illuminate dimensions of the contested meanings of power, gender, spirituality, and identity in the Black Atlantic world.