Maroon Geographies

Abstract

This article synthesizes contributions of a growing body of geographic scholarship on marronage and presents a framework of maroon geographies to guide scholarship and political organizing centered on Black place- making and racial justice. I situate marronage-focused geographic scholarship within Black geographies literature that highlights the reverberations of transatlantic slavery in our current world order and historical and ongoing Black spatial acts of struggle and survival. Based on this scholarship and my own empirical research in Montgomery County, Maryland, I construct a framework of maroon geographies that encompasses physical sites of past flight from slavery as well as spaces produced through contemporary Black struggles. This framework comprises four main features: reworking geographic refuse, Black cooperative place- making, fugitive infrastructure, and a spatial strategy of entanglement. Maroon geographies offer a framework to explicitly address legacies of Black spatial epistemologies and practices that made possible freedom from slavery and that continue to shape sites of radical transformation and possibility. I conclude with a discussion of how the framework can inform scholarship and Black organizing.