About
In “Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora,” Crystal Nicole Eddins proffers a number of marronage tenets:
The Mission
The tenets of marronnage include:
- reclamation of the Black self as a commodified source of capital, and reclaiming and redirecting time, energy, and effort toward individual, familial, or collective needs and interests;
- creation of networks composed of maroons, free, and enslaved people who share social positions and/or liberatory goals;
- networks often characterized by movement or transience, having net work nodes that are linked by women;
- appropriation and subversion of material goods and technologies that are typically used as apparatuses of racial capitalism;
- experiencing geographic, social, economic, and political marginalization, and disempowerment and disenfranchisement from centers of power and capital, yet creating spaces organized around communal principles;
- drawing on intimate knowledge of land, space, and ecologies for immediate or long-term survival;
- using coded forms of communication and systems of protection to enhance solidarity and to avoid surveillance or betrayal by racialized or non-racialized beings whose socio-economic mobility hinges on figurative or literal forms of re-enslavement;
- developing rituals to orient collective ontology, to affirm collective identity, and to build community;
- reimagining, subverting or rejecting, and traversing hegemonic identities, gender norms, and socio-political borders;
- developing self-defense or direct-action fighting techniques and tactics, such as martial arts, bearing arms, or adopting militaristic strategies to contest repression;
- disruption of capital accumulation processes that seek to and do extract resources from Black spaces.
