Saturday, January 4, 2025: 1:50 PM
Riverside Suite (Sheraton New York)
Mapping the continuities between maroon societies in Georgia and Jamaica to Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, Makandal and Boukman in Haiti, this paper explores how insurgent literacy related to armed resistance and maroonage, enacted modalities of self-determination that radically refused the two fundamental contradictions of European modernity’s imposition of the nation-state and its attendant systems and institutions. That is, the (re)conceptualization of what it means to be human and the justification for and maintenance of private property. Drawing on notable revolutionary abolitionists across the Black Muslim geographies, reveals the myriad ways that African and African descendant Muslims built collective self-determination, forms of social organization, and governance that disrupted and forestalled the creation and forced imposition of the nation-state as the dominant mechanism that defines and organizes life.
Through the assertion of African(a) humanity in revolutionary abolitionist movements—instantiated by a total refusal and resistance to chattel slavery, organized rebellions, self-emancipation, the transmission of knowledge/literacy, and maroonage, African(a) Muslims expressed revolutionary praxis in its most articulate form and function, through a grammar of liberation, an understanding of life deeply embedded within West African Islamic intellectual traditions. Centering the deep philosophical and spiritual relationships to Divine Creation embedded within West African Islamic intellectual traditions, an ethics to life and living that are central to understandings of liberation, not only produced the development of a Black geographies (countermapping of the US South, the Caribbean, and West/West Central Africa), but was implicated in the regional development of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. This paper focuses on the ways African(a) Muslims, evolved different types of sociopolitical formations in relation to the production of space, arguing that the ways African/a Muslim communities’ geographic thought and practice, elicits a theory of social organization, governance, and economic activity that provide radical alternatives to a racial capitalist society.
Through the assertion of African(a) humanity in revolutionary abolitionist movements—instantiated by a total refusal and resistance to chattel slavery, organized rebellions, self-emancipation, the transmission of knowledge/literacy, and maroonage, African(a) Muslims expressed revolutionary praxis in its most articulate form and function, through a grammar of liberation, an understanding of life deeply embedded within West African Islamic intellectual traditions. Centering the deep philosophical and spiritual relationships to Divine Creation embedded within West African Islamic intellectual traditions, an ethics to life and living that are central to understandings of liberation, not only produced the development of a Black geographies (countermapping of the US South, the Caribbean, and West/West Central Africa), but was implicated in the regional development of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. This paper focuses on the ways African(a) Muslims, evolved different types of sociopolitical formations in relation to the production of space, arguing that the ways African/a Muslim communities’ geographic thought and practice, elicits a theory of social organization, governance, and economic activity that provide radical alternatives to a racial capitalist society.