Fugitive Modernities, Spirit Biographies, and the Transatlantic Politics of Reputation: Angola and the Americas in the Seventeenth Century

Since at least the sixteenth century, residents of borderland regions that eschewed the rule of centralized states and forged societies dependant on the integration of fugitives figured prominently in the imagination of leaders of the kingdoms of Kongo, Ndongo, and Portugal.  Described as hostile terrain inhabited by bellicose and intractable resisters, two such territories – Kisama and Ndembos -- confounded the desires of both African heads of state and their European interlocutors.  I explore the political and intellectual histories of these societies outside the state in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Angola, interrogating what it meant to be, become, or perform “Kisama” or “Ndembos” without the kinds of political or social institutions that both present-day scholars and contemporary observers normally used to delineate identities.  Building on several centuries of records concerning critical local leaders in Kisama and Ndembos – imagined locally as enduring spirits – I trace the way that notions of political legitimacy and social belonging were shaped and contested by waves of fugitives. 

Moving across the Atlantic, I follow these fugitive political ideologies and practices inflected the histories of two seventeenth-century maroon communities: Limón outside of Cartagena and Brazil’s famous Palmares, whose residents described their own community as “fugitive Angola.”  Arguing that claims of African identities in the Americas should be read not as simplistic evidence of provenance but rather as layered political claims, I examine how widely-circulating notions of fugitive politics in Angola allowed those who never set foot in Kisama or Ndembos to draw from their ideological and reputational repertoires in the Americas.  By focusing on a trans-Atlantic history of politics outside of the state, we are able to discern currents of subaltern modernities rooted in Africa, forcing us to interrogate the role of fugitive political and intellectual histories in the evolution of modernity, capital, and state.