This doctoral dissertation project is about the relationship between resistance practices of maroons, established communities of escaped slaves, and colonial governance practices in the Caribbean at the turn of the nineteenth century. Maroon settlements were typically located in less desirable locations such as swamps and hills surrounding plantations and were endemic to plantation landscapes across the Americas during colonial times. While they played a central role in historical events such as the Haitian Revolution, scholarly research has largely overlooked them. This project will contribute to this understudied field by examining the extent to which colonial responses to marronage, the act of escape among slaves, transformed ideas about race in the Americas and altered strategies for securing political and economic control over colonial territories. Findings from this investigation will advance understandings of how notions of racial difference were produced in the nineteenth century and later, and how forms of colonial governance took shape in the Americas. By focusing on the French Caribbean, it contributes to filling a gap in historical studies that overlook Francophone aspects of the Atlantic world. This project will investigate three questions about the relationship between strategies of French colonial governance and resistance practices of maroons. First, how did colonial authorities understand marronage across the French Caribbean at the turn of the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to its role in daily plantation operations and its effects on colonial ideas about race and sovereignty? Second, what institutional actions, such as new laws or changing military strategies, did French colonial authorities take in response to the real or imagined threat of marronage after the Haitian Revolution, and were these changes implemented in the same way across the French Caribbean? Third, how did maroons in different parts of the French Caribbean respond to such changes in governance practices? Through archival research at key sites in the French colonial archive, this study will analyze historical documents such as correspondence between colonial administrators, military reports, and court proceedings pertaining to escaped or fugitive slaves, in an effort to better understand the geographic complexity of the struggle between maroons and colonial authorities. In the process, new knowledge about the social construction of race and struggles over sovereignty in the Atlantic world will be generated.
The struggle between maroons and French colonial administrators played an important role in shaping the economies, social structures, and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean, even into the present. Studying the influence of maroons on such processes can improve our understanding of how the region developed historically and why it looks the way that it does today. The role played by maroons, however, is not merely a relic of the past, as the tensions and legacies of their struggle linger into the present and have implications for the future. In many places across the Caribbean and Latin America today descendants of maroons claim a heritage of resistance to reframe ongoing struggles over cultural, political, and land rights. This project will help reveal the historical roots of contemporary attempts to revise maroon narratives. It will also highlight the broader implications of such efforts for communities of maroon descendants struggling to maintain their cultural identities and access to traditional lands in an age of heritage tourism and resurgent national politics. Findings and results generated by this research will be disseminated through the publication of journal articles, presentations at professional conferences, and public lectures. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
