Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
Traditional Maroon culture was, however, determined to be in need of safeguarding and protection because of several factors. Chief among these was the fact that transmission of traditional knowledge from elders to younger generations was not taking place on the scale it was used to and the fact that migration patterns saw large numbers of Maroon youth leaving the traditional sites of settlements. In response, UNESCO was petitioned to assist in safeguarding traditional Maroon culture in Jamaica, in particular, that of the Maroons of Moore Town, who were deemed to be the most remote. In November 2003, UNESCO declared the Maroon Heritage of Moore Town as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This action facilitated the implementation of measures geared toward documenting, for posterity, traditional Maroon cuisine, language, the Kromanti play and the craftsmanship associated with the creation of tools and implements such as their unique Prentin drum, fishpots, spears and the abeng.
Focuses on discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of the argumentis the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging.
Examines how marginalized Maroon youth in Paramaribo, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Suriname, employ musical strategies in combating ethno-racial stigmatization and improving their socio-economic position. Traditionally, Maroons, after escaping the plantations during slavery, have lived in semi-isolation in Suriname's dense rainforest. In recent decades, they have become increasingly urbanized, to the discontent of many in Paramaribo, who view Maroons as backward, violent criminals. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and popular culture analysis, the article discusses how young Maroons use reggae and dancehall to create and recreate physical and social spaces of their own within the city and outside the forest. They protest local conditions and inequity by drawing on regional images of marginality that have been shaped by Rastafari musicians in Jamaica.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
319 p., Africans in Jamaica developed and exhibited a multiplicity of cultural identities and a complex set of relationships amongst themselves, reflective of their varied cultural, political, social, and physical origins. In the context of late-18th and early-19th century Buff Bay, Jamaica, most Africans were enslaved by whites to serve as laborers on plantations. However, a smaller group of Africans emerged from enslavement on plantations to form their own autonomous Maroon communities, alongside the plantation context and within the system of slavery. These two groups, enslaved Africans and Maroons, had a very complex set of relationship and identities that were fluid and constantly negotiated within the Jamaican slave society that was in turn hostile to both groups.
The article reports on archaeologists search for archaeological sites of the Maroons, runaway slaves of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in West Indies. Archaeologists claim that Maroons have the ability to become invisible. The efficacy of their tactic has made them elusive to slavery. It states that the constant threat of recapture and castigation on the island of Saint Croix led them to hide in remote, defensible spots that were hard to see. Moreover, archaeologists face difficulties in predicting the locations of the Maroons because they are do not leave any evidence of their presence.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
509 p., Presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans' experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Includes Emmanuel Kofi Agorsah's "Scars of brutality : archaeology of the Maroons in the Caribbean."
Investigates the Islamic heritage of the Maroon societies in Jamaica and the Islamic nature of the Baptist Rebellion which brought an end to slavery in Jamaica and in the British West Indies. The Maroons are the enslaved Muslims who took flight or ran away from plantations in Jamaica. An overview of the African diaspora in the Americas, including Jamaica and the West Indies is presented. The strong Islamic faith of the Maroons are manifested in their use of Qur'anic terms, Islamic salutation, Islamic governance, Muslim names and Islamic actions.
"Transgression and taboo which have a symbolic meaning in Caribbean societies are used in one of her short stories, “De sueur, de sucre et de sang” to articulate a social and feminist discourse. She uses the highly symbolic figure of the Nègre marron and ideology of marronnage to create a marronnage en abîme that has an aesthetic and ideological significance.
Blouin,Francis X. (Author) and Rosenberg,William G. (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2006
Published:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
502 p, Essays exploring the importance of archives as artifacts of culture As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, archives help define for individuals, communities, and states what is both knowable and known about their pasts. Includes Laurent Dubois' "Maroons in the archives: the uses of the past in the French Caribbean."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enligtenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents - including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases - the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates." --Jacket.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
381 p., About the struggles of enslaved Africans inthe Americas who achieved freedom through flight and the establishment of Maroon communities in the face of overwhelming military odds on the part of the slaveholders. Incontestably, Maroon communities constituted the first independent polities from European colonial rule in the hemisphere, even if the colonial states did not accord them legal recognition.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p., From the days of slavery, the Negro from Martinique has never stopped "marronner", that is to say, to try to escape his condition, winning the great woods, the plebeians districts boroughs or even the neighboring islands. Simon, principal figure of the book, was one of them. He knew in the 17th century the arrival of the first slaves from Africa Guinea, the eighteenth hell of sugar plantations in the nineteenth fever abolition, in the early twentieth that of marching strikes and, at the dawn of XXI, the mare desperadoes of false modernity.
