Description: What is the opposite of freedom? In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Crucial to his investigation is the concept of marronage--a form of slave escape that was an important aspect of Caribbean and Latin American slave systems. Examining this overlooked phenomenon--one of action from slavery and toward freedom--he deepens our understanding of freedom itself and the origin of our political ideals.
Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space--that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.Brief description:
Neil Roberts is associate professor of Africana studies and a faculty affiliate in political science at Williams College.
Review Quotes: "Blazing a path through critical discussions of republican theory, the writings of Frederick Douglass and Edouard Glissant, the Haitian Revolution, and Rastafari, Freedom as Marronage confronts readers with a deceivingly simple question: how does a person become 'free'? Freedom, Neil Roberts answers, cannot be understood without considering the dominant term that opposes freedom in political modernity: slavery. However, instead of treating these as opposite conditions and states of being--or rather, more strictly speaking, as Roberts posits following Frantz Fanon, as a state of being opposed to a zone of nonbeing--Freedom as Marronage shows that freedom emerges in enslaved persons' escape from and active negation of slavery. . . . Consequently, despite the infamous and widely cited consignment of slaves to what Orlando Patterson called a condition of 'social death, ' Roberts insists that enslaved persons do not in fact lack agency. In and by marronage, a formerly enslaved person, whether alone or together with others, asserts herself as an agent capable of altering the circumstances and political relations that condition her being. The emphasis on slave agency constitutes an important intervention in political theory at this moment, just after the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, which is still widely understood as having 'freed'--juridically, from above--many (but not all) slaves in the United States. . . . Certainly, Freedom as Marronage proves that Roberts does not write in a tentative voice but always takes his stances boldly."
-- "Perspectives on Politics"