Maroon Communities Research Articles

Vernacular Names of Traditional Rice Varieties Reveal the Unique History of Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana

Rice is a keystone crop in all Maroon communities in Suriname and French Guyana today and they cultivate hundreds of traditional varieties. Historically, rice can be considered an indicator crop for successful marronnage in the Guianas. Unraveling local variety names can reveal the history, farming systems, spiritual significance and probably the diversity of rice in Maroon communities. We interviewed 67 rice farmers (96% female), collected over 400 rice specimens and built a database with 284 unique rice names from our own fieldwork and previously collected names. The process of naming a rice variety is complex, but there are recurrent patterns among the five Maroon groups we studied. We categorized names referring to morphology, agronomy, animals, humans, and rice brought from specific regions or by other Maroon and non-Maroon groups. Very few names are shared between Maroon groups. When we showed the farmers six rice varieties from outside their village, all recognized African rice (Oryza glaberrima) and pende (O. sativa with spotted husks). When a variety was unknown, an initial name was given based on its morphology. Maroon rice names are truly unique as they reflect the varieties that were available, the history of plantations and marronnage, climate aspects that influenced the selection of farmers, the many separate groups of runaways joining the Maroons, the adaptation to the Amazonian ecosystem, and their contacts with outsiders. Our results show that unravelling Maroon rice names leads to a better understanding of the close connection between the process of marronage, locally developed agricultural practices, and connections to West Africa. These historical origins continue to exist and form a unique Maroon system of variety exchange, farm management and crop diversity.

Maroons, buccaneers, and the legend of Trou Forban

ABSTRACT Throughout Atlantic modernity, maroon and buccaneer encounters have generated long-lasting legacies that remain largely unexplored. In this essay I trace how these encounters included various forms of mutual recognition among Saint-Domingue’s black and white clandestine people. This history of mutual recognition sheds fresh light on the cultural and ideological context informing the role maroon societies were playing in fomenting slave insurrection in the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution. I also argue that it contributed to the development of Haiti’s postcolonial identity, folklore, politics, and popular theater. My main sources are colonial records, place names, Vodou mythology, and Haitian intellectual and literary history. I focus on the emergence of zombie and pirate lore as it became one of the most enduring legacies of mutual maroon and buccaneer recognition in Haiti and the Atlantic world.

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean by Tessa Murphy

Reviewed by: The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean by Tessa Murphy Tyson Reeder The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. By tessa murphy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. iii + 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-5338-2. $45.00 (hardcover). With this well-researched book, Murphy brings readers to an underexplored region of the Caribbean: the southeastern islands within the chain traditionally known as the Lesser Antilles. Murphy dubs the islands the Creole Archipelago, which she defines as "a chain of small volcanic islands, each visible from the next, that stretches 280 miles from Guadeloupe in the north to Grenada in the south" (p. 6). More than a physical space, though, the Creole Archipelago featured a diverse, even cosmopolitan, community that adapted, resisted, fled, fought, and integrated within their shared island string. By highlighting the persistent drive for autonomy among the islands' indigenous residents, enslaved peoples, and settler populations, Murphy reveals Europe's unsteady advance toward empire in the region. From time to [End Page 146] time, empires swapped nominal sovereignty over the islands during the approximately 150-year span examined by Murphy. Control remained elusive, however, as many of the inhabitants lived, interacted, and created a creole society beyond the reach of imperial power. Murphy is at her best when analyzing the perseverance of the Kalinagos—the indigenous inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles—in retaining their autonomy and resisting imperial expansion. She examines and dispels earlier myths that explained the disappearance of the Kalinagos from imperial archives during the eighteenth century. As she explains, the Kalinagos did not disappear from the islands; they were erased from the archives. As European officials and settlers tried to control the commerce and politics of the southeastern Caribbean, they sought comfort in fantasies that they no longer contended with an indigenous population. One prominent fiction held that they were "Black Caribs," descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement. By the final half of the eighteenth century, many Europeans considered the Kalinagos as maroon communities rather than autonomous indigenous societies who had resisted imperial domination. While the Kalinagos did mix with people escaped from slavery, they retained their indigenous identity throughout the eighteenth century. The Kalinagos did cede territory to Europeans but never as extensively as imperial officials liked to believe. Settler society gradually pushed marginalized groups such as escaped Africans into Kalinago space and ceased to recognize those regions as the dominion of the indigenous community. Written records may have failed to acknowledge the continued presence of Kalinagos, but that elision hardly made them disappear. Focusing on the Kalinago experience, Murphy expands creolism as an analytical category. She notes that indigenous communities rarely feature in studies of creolism. As she contends, that absence is a remnant of the long process of erasing indigeneity from political, diplomatic, and societal records. She argues that "when Indigenous nations incorporate other peoples, languages, and practices into their communities, colonizers often cast them as no longer Indigenous, thereby denying Indigenous claims to land or sovereignty" (p. 6). For example, by recasting Kalinagos as "Black Caribs," European observers reimagined them as part of the enslaved community. That change depicted the Kalinagos as a subset within the colonial system rather than a sovereign community outside it. The book is unclear, however, about how identifying indigenous communities with creolization would save them from that erasure. Though a notoriously fluid term, creolism was at root a way to define [End Page 147] people according to birthplace invented by the very settler-colonial regimes that sought to erase indigeneity from their lands and records. Murphy argues that the "processes of creolization allowed Kalinagos to remain important, if little-acknowledged, political, military, and economic actors up to the present day" (p. 7). Yet those same processes seem to have allowed European settlers and officials to elide Kalinagos from their collective imagination by casting them as something other than indigenous. At another point, the book mentions "the societies that emerged at the interstices of competing Indigenous, European, and Creole regimes," apparently placing indigeneity and creolism in tension, not unison (p. 231). Murphy clearly wants to link creolization with the persistent presence of Kalinagos, but she leaves that critical...

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow Michael Menor Salgarolo (bio) At the height of southern Jim Crow and the dawn of America’s colonial empire in the Pacific, Filipino nationalist intellectual Sixto López paid a visit to Louisiana. López was surprised to learn that communities of Filipino fishermen had settled in Louisiana’s bayous decades before America’s colonization of the Philippines in 1898. He was even more surprised to see the way they were treated by their white neighbors. “[I]t might be thought,” wrote López, “that in New Orleans, where southern racial or ‘color’ prejudice is said to run to extremes, the Filipinos would be subjected to all the disabilities and prejudices attaching to the negro.” López found, however, that such was not the case. He noted that many Filipinos had close personal and commercial relationships with Cajuns, Italians, and the other white inhabitants of southern Louisiana. Many Filipino fishermen had married white women and sent their children to white schools. The apparent lack of discrimination faced by Filipinos in Louisiana was all the more unexpected given the context of American colonialism in the Philippines, where the United States justified its domination of the islands by propagating the notion that Filipinos were racially unfit for self-governance. While “in his own country, [the Filipino] is a semi-savage, incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship,” López observed, “the Filipinos of New Orleans are in all respects treated as white men.”1 [End Page 25] By the time of López’s arrival, Filipino men had established settlements in lower Louisiana for nearly half a century.2 Their arrival was a result of Western commercial expansion into East Asia in the nineteenth century. As Spain’s imperial government began to open Philippine ports to trade with all nations, a spike in foreign commerce led to a demand for native Philippine sailors, known in the English-speaking world as “Manilamen.” Often recruited through deception or coercion, “Manilamen,” like nineteenth-century sailors of all nationalities, frequently evaded brutal working conditions by deserting when ships came to port. Filipino deserters formed communities in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and Barcelona and built fishing villages in Australia’s Torres Strait and Kalk Bay, South Africa.3 In Louisiana, Filipino sailors established a semi-autonomous settlement at a place called Bayou St. Malo, located deep in the coastal marshes of St. Bernard Parish. St. Malo was named for Juan San Maló, the leader of an eighteenth-century Black maroon community who lived on the site.4 By the late nineteenth century, St. Malo had become home to nearly 150 people, mostly Filipino fishermen and their families.5 [End Page 26] In this article, I contextualize López’s observations about race by reconstructing the racial formation of Louisiana Filipinos from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth.6 Using newspapers, census manuscripts, memoirs, and court records, I shed light on a process shaped by both imperial racial knowledge and local racial ideologies. Much of the historical literature on Asian American migration to the U.S. South has focused on the issue of racial formation. A number of important studies have focused on the segregated South in the mid-twentieth century, seeking to answer the paradigmatic question, “where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Scholars have built on Leslie Bow’s nuanced understanding of Asian Americans in the South as “interstitial” figures whose presence reveals both the limits and the flexibility of Jim Crow’s Black-white racial binary.7 These studies form part of a growing field of writing on “third” or “inbetween” peoples in the South and the nation that examines the ways non-Black racialized peoples have navigated, challenged, and upheld systems of white supremacy rooted in anti-Black racism.8 Scholars have tackled similar questions in studies of Creoles of color in New Orleans, seeking to understand how this population of mixed European and African descent claimed rights and defined their social identities within the rigid [End Page 27] Black-white racial binary...

Palmares e Cucaú: O aprendizado da dominação

Palmares e Cucaú: O aprendizado da dominação

Black Towns and (Legal) Marronage

Since the U.S. antebellum era, enslaved and free Black people established places of their own to defend against White supremacist violence. These communities often formed on perilous landscapes, spaces considered undesirable, inaccessible, and uninhabitable by White planter classes. This form of fugitivity persisted after the postbellum era, and recurs in various forms in the present day, commonly through the formation of legally sanctioned Black communities. The rationales for contemporary incorporation of Black towns share similarities with their maroon predecessors—localized power and figurative escape from the whims of White governance. Using archival data, public databases, and secondary sources on Princeville, North Carolina, I argue that Black towns are not “towns” in the same way that White-founded towns exist in the United States, not only because of the persistent forms of violence leveled at them, but also because ontologically, Black towns do not develop from the same experiences and purposes as White towns. Despite their formal recognition by the state or other forms of legal status, Black towns often resemble their predecessors, maroon communities, which were extralegal spaces of freedom and alternative land relation formed in resistance to slavery in the West, beginning in the sixteenth century. The Town of Princeville established models of land and community relations that supersede capitalist development paradigms undergirding the municipality. This research builds on previous studies of contemporary plantation power relations, marronage, and Black place development and proposes alternative modes of place based on lessons from Princeville.

Maroon justice in Suriname: pasts and presents worth fighting for

ABSTRACT Maroon societies are seriously understudied in the restorative justice (RJ) field, which is odd considering their age-old struggle against retributive justice systems. Precisely because the rise of Maroons can be understood as an attempt to ‘reappropriate conflict’ and bring back legal protection to formerly enslaved African-Americans who had been subjected to the crudest of laws under colonial regimes, we should not forget that history when considering how RJ can contribute to or replace criminal justice systems in the 21st century. In Suriname, a renewed interest in the Maroons has recently boosted the RJ movement. Against the background of a discussion between maximalists and abolitionists, we reactivate the ‘transferability debate’ by asking if and how maroon justice in the country’s interior can be brought to the city and help its criminal justice system to develop RJ. Our answer combines 20th century anthropologists’ work on maroon justice in Suriname with the first steps that we have taken in our own ethnography with ex-detained Maroon and Creole youth in Paramaribo and their receptiveness to hypothetical RJ measures.

Fugitive Rivers: Maroon Ecologies and Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde

ABSTRACT The demarcation of borders along rivers produces contested ecologies where the very same water bodies that have been exploited and weaponised for the purposes of division are also crucial routes of crossing for those in search of asylum. These riverine routes of necessity in search of refuge echo the fugitive processes of escape from enslavement and establishing maroon communities upstream and outside of the plantation imaginary. Starting with rivers in Black and maroon ecology, spatial conceptions of legibility, and the submerged plot, this article involves a reading of Édouard Glissant’s early novel La Lézarde (1958) in which a river features as protagonist of a plot to rise up against ongoing colonial rule in the context of Martinique’s transition from French colony to département. Fugitive spatial imaginaries present the possibility of understanding and living with rivers beyond the grip of colonialism and the plantation system.

Collectivity, Memory, and Art Making: Marcel Pinas and the Maroons in Suriname

This article develops an online interview conducted with the visual artist Marcel Pinas who lives and works in the Caribbean continental country of Suriname, South America. Marcel Pinas, starting from his standpoint as a Maroon clan descendant, focuses his art practice, art projects, and art festival on the country’s complex Maroon culture. The interview analyzes the country’s historical and sociopolitical context and explains the creative process and communitarian development of the art festival that Marcel Pinas initiated in Moengo, a symbolic location for the Maroon population and for Suriname’s post-independence history. Moreover, following the artist’s opinions and shared the article integrates Marcel Pinas’ artworks and installations—even when these are referred to ever so tacitly—and shows some of the relationships between his art practices and the Maroon communities as well as interconnections with the global contemporary art world.

Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 by Damian Alan Pargas

Pargas’ thoughtful new book is not quite what it seems. Its title notwithstanding, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 is not a comprehensive new history of fugitivity from North American slavery. It does not attend to every variety of freedom seeking; military service with the British during the War of 1812 in return for postwar liberty is, for instance, noticeably absent. Nor does it assess the political significance of freedom seeking in the sectional crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Instead, Pargas has delivered something no less useful—a new and conceptually powerful spatial analysis of fugitivity. Taking a continental approach, Pargas delineates three spaces of freedom for African Americans seeking liberty from slavery: (1) spaces of informal freedom, (2) spaces of semiformal freedom, and (3) spaces of formal freedom.This differentiation is fresh yet wholly intuitive. Spaces of informal freedom were those locations within nineteenth-century slave states in which enslaved people could try to pass for free by disguising their identities and origins—urban centers like New Orleans and Baltimore, or maroon communities like those in Virginia and South Carolina. Spaces of semiformal freedom encompassed those states north of the Mason–Dixon line in which legislatures (or, occasionally, the judiciary) had begun the process of abolishing slavery. Fugitives from slavery arriving in these jurisdictions could live in de facto freedom, though the threat of capture and rendition under the terms of federal fugitive slave laws meant that that their liberty was fragile and potentially reversible. In contrast, the only reliable guarantees of formal freedom for fugitives from slavery existed beyond the borders of the antebellum United States, typically in British Canada and Mexico.Pargas’ tripartite territorial typology certainly has its limitations. The legal jeopardy of those who escaped slavery by manumission was more modest than that of those who simply took to their heels; the emancipatory experiences of these two groups should not be confused or collapsed. Likewise, in stark contrast to those who resettled in southern Ohio or southern Pennsylvania, fugitives who escaped to the most northerly regions of the free soil states—say, New England, Michigan, or Wisconsin—generally enjoyed robust protection from re-enslavement before the passage of Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Furthermore, Canada and Mexico achieved free-soil status only belatedly—Mexico in 1829 and Canada in a drawn-out process that was not complete until 1834—and quality of life for Black newcomers to these two legal sanctuaries varied enormously.Nonetheless, by imposing coherence on something that was, in his own estimation, “messy and exceedingly complicated,” Pargas provides scholars and students alike with a clear and usable set of tools to think about space, migration, and security (7). To do so, he musters an array of methods and approaches. On the one hand, Freedom Seekers is a legal and constitutional history of Black liberty in which statutes and court cases loom predictably large. On the other hand, it is also a human history attentive to motivation, opportunity, and contingency. Black actors from James Somerset to Margaret Morgan play prominent roles throughout; Pargas takes pains to remind readers that enslaved people were never passive passengers on the Underground Railroad. Quite the contrary. They were self-emancipators. They freed themselves.Freedom Seekers is never flashy. The language is generally flat; no one would ever mistake Pargas’ prose for poetry. Some of the terminology (for instance, slaves, masters, and runaways) is also unhelpful and outdated. Yet the analytical payload delivered between these covers is remarkable. Pargas’ book not only builds upon his 2018 edited volume about the same subject but also effectively synthesizes the profusion of recent work about practical abolition by Baumgartner, Harrold, Walker, Blackett, Churchill, and many others.1

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution by Crystal Nicole Eddins

<i>Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution</i> by Crystal Nicole Eddins

For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

It is a troubling time to be hopeful about land and labor in Brazil. As Merle Bowen notes in the concluding chapter of For Land and Liberty, the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his administration have dismantled environmental protections, opened protected areas to agro-industrial development, and stalled programs that provide access to land for members of Brazil's quilombo communities. Gains from conditional cash transfer programs and the rewriting of public school curriculuma are being reversed, eroded, or eviscerated. Other attacks on the lives and livelihoods of Black and Brown persons in Brazil include assassinations of environmental activists, attempts to revoke affirmative action in higher education, and the undermining of public health efforts to address COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Indigenous and other minorities.Bowen spent fifteen years examining the ways structural racism operates in rural areas of Brazil, where access to land and labor continues to be one of the most pressing issues. Residents of Black rural communities are corralled by a “highly concentrated and racialized system of landownership” (212). The slow and highly contentious land reform process competes with agro-industrial interests, logging and mining companies, grileiros (people who claim ownership with fabricated deeds), and environmental protection projects, resulting in forced relocation, dispossession, and shifts in the nature, extent, and types of labor available.Bowen assembled information from a vast array of sources and stakeholders including anthropologists, government ministers, landowners, and Afro-Brazilian activists, as well as archives, primary and secondary publications, and ethnographic data. She provides a detailed, close-up view of what this looks like “on the ground” for twelve Black rural communities in two very different regions: Bahia (in the northeast) and the interior of São Paulo. This attention to regional differences is an important complement to the scholarly literature, as it provides a deeper understanding of the history, local conditions, demographics, crops, instability of wage labor, and the gendered nature of labor, disrupting the tendency to homogenize or romanticize the struggles that quilombolas face.Chapter 2 traces the history, heterogeneity, and shifting agendas of Black activists and the efforts that led to the insertion of a land reform initiative in the 1988 Constitution (Article 68), which guaranteed permanent collective ownership to federally recognized Maroon communities (also called remanescentes de quilombos or quilombo remnant communities). There are an estimated four thousand quilombo communities in both urban and rural areas in Brazil. The communities Bowen focuses on are representative of those still waiting for a land title. The titling process is long and complicated, and until they receive a land title, residents of traditional Black communities are under constant threat of expulsion or relocation. Petitions for land titles have generated charges of reverse racism and violence from those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of quilombola rights to territory. Since 1988, receiving a title has been the exception rather than the rule.Bowen's research provides a fine-grained assessment of the challenges in applying Article 68, including operationalizing “who” is a quilombola, and how shifting jurisdictional procedures, state laws favoring titling, and market forces have impacted the daily lives of rural quilombolas (Chapters 2 and 3). The anchor or signature of identity for those in Black rural communities is “rootedness” to the land they occupy, drawn from an intergenerational accumulation of agroecological knowledge and practices, a distinction from urban communities that do not rely on the land for their livelihood (Chapter 4).In Chapter 5, Bowen turns to the “commodification of Quilombola culture” as a revenue strategy and a chance for “self-determination and self-making” (182). There has been less investment in quilombo tourism than in tourism along coastal beach areas, ecotourism in the Amazon region, or pro-poor/reality tourism in urban shantytowns. Despite the lack of evidence, assertions are made about the potential positive impact of tourism in quilombos through job creation. Although there is little research on tourism in quilombos, some suggest that it presents a simplified and incomplete rendering of the past (and present) by focusing only on African cultural retentions while obscuring the knowledge, experiences, and skills of enslaved workers in a nation that was built on their labor. Success is more evident when quilombolas set the terms for what to showcase and have a major stake in ownership and representation. Unfortunately, conflict with tourist agencies' agendas and other imbalances in the quilombo tourism industry have reinforced racial, class, and gendered disparities, and do little to reduce poverty.Scholars of Latin American studies, Africana studies, history, geography, anthropology, and agrarian studies will get an extensive overview of the regional complexities in applying a land reform program, including what was promised and what has failed to deliver. It is not altogether a grim portrait; but the long-term benefits of these policies in transforming the livelihoods of those in Black rural communities remain contingent on access to labor as well as a land title.

Frequency and characterization of RHD and RHCE variants in the Noir Marron population from French Guiana.

The RH system is one of the most polymorphic blood group systems due to the proximity and opposite orientation of RHD and RHCE genes. Numerous alleles are described and can affect Rh protein expression. This complexity is especially evident in populations of African origin. We performed RHD and RHCE genotyping of the Noir Marron population in French Guiana. This population belongs to the Maroon community who are direct descendants of African slaves, who escaped from Dutch plantations, in the current day Suriname, during the 17th century. They represent an original ethnic group with highly blended culture. A total of 89 DNA samples were collected from four different ethnic groups of the Noir Marron population of French Guiana. RHD and RHCE genotyping was performed using DNA microarray and/or sequencing. Significant allelic diversity was shown, with 45% of individuals presenting an RHD gene variant (most common: RHD*DAU, RHD*DIVa, and RHD*DIIIa allele) and 9.4% with a partial D phenotype. Likewise, 85% presenting an RHCE gene variant and 9% a partial RH2 antigen. One original allele was identified in two D+ Noir Marron individuals: a hybrid RHD*DIIIa-CE(9)-D allele, encoding probably a partial D antigen and associated with an RHCE*ce(48C,733G,1006T) allele. The African diversity of RHD and RHCE genes is found in this population with preserved genetic but mixed cultural backgrounds. These data allow us to describe the characteristics of the RH system antigen and highlights a significant number of partial antigens with a risk of alloimmunization.

Traditional Aucan knowledge on fish and plants eaten by fish along the Tapanahoni River, Suriname

Suriname’s freshwater systems are home to a large diversity of (endemic) fish species, and communities of Suriname’s interior strongly depend on this diversity for their nutrient intake. However, studies on traditional knowledge of the country’s freshwater fish and fish-plant interactions are scarce. Here, we present our findings of a pilot study in the Aucan Maroon community of Diitabiki (Tapanahoni river). We report the species of freshwater fish caught for food, their corresponding Aucan names and plants eaten by fish and/or used for fishing by the local population. We held semi-structured interviews and performed participant observation with fishers and forest guides in August and September 2021. We recorded 14 fish species, of which 12 were identified to species level, and recorded 16 Aucan fish names, of which nine were previously undocumented. Furthermore, we reported 11 plant species that were used for fishing and one fish poison (Tephrosia sinapou (Buc’hoz) A.Chev.). Suriname’s riverine ecosystems are threatened by gold mining activities that endanger the health of local communities, as well as the fish populations and riverine forests on which both people and fish depend. Local knowledge on fish, their feeding behavior and the flooded forests is essential for the conservation of this important Amazonian ecosystem, for the development of sustainable management plans and health education programs on mercury levels in consumption fish.

Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dende Coast by Case Watkins

Watkins’ book provides a master lesson in interdisciplinary history, constructing a detailed analysis of long-term geographical, political, social, and ecological relationships across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. It is grounded in stories of real people like the enslaved, Brazilian-born Benta, and the landscapes that they inhabit. Drawing on geography and anthropology, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, and political ecology, Watkins combines ethnographic, historical, and geospatial methods to investigate the linkages of societies, environments, and power. His account illuminates the nuances of the transatlantic “Columbian exchange” in new and surprising ways, within the framework of decolonial theory and practice.1 “Rather than rigid binaries of top-down and reactionary forces, this book traces power through networked and fluid contingencies that coalesce in transatlantic socio-ecological assemblages” (268).The dendê palm and the distinctive red cooking oil that it produces—a core cultural element in Afro-Brazilian cuisine and religions in Bahia, Brazil—provides an ideal vehicle for Watkins to explore how human–environmental relations created innovative, biodiverse communities. As he portrays it, Bahia’s emergent cultural landscapes of dendê offer a counterpoint to the homogeneous monocultural production landscapes of global capitalism that often leave socio-environmental degradation in their wake.Watkins combines photos, texts, and documents, such as ship manifests and estate inventories from archival and other historical sources, with original photographic images and quotations from 453 interviews conducted during a decade of fieldwork in Bahia. He uses landscape interpretation and other geospatial analytical methods to link geo-referenced field locations to historical and current accounts. He skillfully combines these methods as part of a hybrid, “interactive and iterative research strategy” (41), carefully framing and outlining for each chapter research innovations that produced the rich and powerful findings. His reconstruction of the development of Bahia’s palm-oil landscapes, for example, is anchored by two figures that locate the property boundaries of mid-nineteenth-century quilombos (Afro-descendant maroon communities) alongside the current location of quilombos in the same places, now surrounded by “vast monocultures and pastures” (132). In Chapter 6, he explores the evolution of Bahia’s dendê economy through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using probate inventories and other primary documents to reconstruct the history of four Bahian families interlinked by kinship and slavery.The focus on cultural landscapes reveals the contrast between the complex, diversified dendê landscapes that afforded food security, biodiversity, and cultural meanings and the homogenous, modern monocultures that are more legible to public authorities.2 Largely invisible in official statistics and policies, the extensive “semi-wild” groves and forests on Bahia’s Dendê Coast were “planted by vultures” who carried the seeds that were then nurtured by local farmers—based on traditional African practices—through complex interactions between people and places on both sides of the Atlantic. The biodiverse “emergent” groves, which originated as an integral part of transatlantic trade, were recreated in Bahia through cross-species collaborations involving mixed peoples (quilombolas, freed people, enslaved people, and Indigenous), as a form of resistance and resilience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evidence shows a surprisingly significant participation by Afro-descendants, including women palm-oil processors and vendors, in direct trade between Africa and Brazil. “This book demonstrates how biodiverse palm groves, as legacies of African knowledge and practice, came to distinguish Bahia’s dendê landscapes despite centuries of colonial mandates and modern development schemes that sought to impose and enforce austere monocultures” (31).Palm Oil Diaspora’s relational approach to interdisciplinary history connects with the concrete struggles and forms of resistance that still characterize the people of Bahia’s Dendê Coast. These people continue to struggle, striving “towards a more cohesive framework of life and livelihoods” that can encompass the virtues of biodiversity, complexity, and cultural meaning (284).

Dimensiones del conflicto: Resistencia, violencia y policía en el mundo urbano

This hefty collection, 530 pages long, has 20 chapters by authors of multiple nationalities. Nineteen essays are in Spanish and one in Portuguese; the book also includes an introduction (in Spanish) as well as a preface and postface (both in Italian). The time frame spans the 1400s to around 1800. The collection espouses a global perspective that is preeminently Spanish, centered in Iberia, with two forays into Portugal, one into Sardinia under Spanish rule, and four into Spanish America. Chapters on Asia and Africa have a Spanish connection through missionaries in China and the Philippines as well as Catholic “renegades” who converted to Islam in northern Africa.The broad geographical and chronological scope is of a piece with the wide-ranging subject matter outlined in the title: resistance, violence, and police, primarily but not exclusively in early modern urban contexts. The introduction by Tomás Mantecón Movellán, Marina Torres Arce, and Susana Truchuelo García reviews four broad themes into which the essays are grouped: urban cultures and imaginaries of order and conflict, typologies and protagonists of conflict, tensions and reconstruction of order, and police and discipline. Yet the essays' widely different topics and approaches resist comparison or comprehensive conclusions. Several studies deal with minute subjects like resistance to standard weights and measures in the Spanish region of Galicia or ceremonial quarrels between the archbishops of Cagliari and Spanish viceroys of Sardinia. Other contributions offer broader perspectives on resistance “from below,” by slaves, Indigenous people, or ordinary Iberian women, and “from above,” by nobles thwarting Spanish Bourbon monarchs' efforts to professionalize the army. It is up to readers to draw their own lessons and comparisons.The preface and postface, respectively by the Italian historians Angela De Benedictis and Livio Antonielli, offer guidance. Even at the height of absolute monarchies, everyone understood that authorities should not wield their power or use force indiscriminately. Jurists acknowledged the right to resist as something natural. One did not need to be a lawyer to know this. A young man resisting unjust arrest on false grounds, a wife and mother loudly protesting high bread prices, and rebels everywhere clamoring distant rulers for justice all acted on the conviction that their actions were legitimate and sometimes even legal. The early modern concept of police was much broader, encompassing all areas of life: moral, political, economic, and spiritual. Policing was therefore decentralized, subject to seemingly inefficient, even irrational overlap of jurisdictions that in fact reflected practices and strategies constantly adapting to society's needs.Rather than engage with these ideas, the chapters offer their own, often very different takes on resistance, violence, and police, showing that there is no consensus about their meaning. Images on the book cover of massacres, public executions, and armed fighting reflect the assumption that violence and physical coercion were central elements of policing and resistance. Yet many of the chapters discuss nonviolent forms of resistance ranging from the symbolic gesture of an archbishop refusing to cede his place of honor in a church in deference to secular authority to individuals who simply ignored orders from authorities, often quietly to avoid drawing attention.Fortunately for readers of this journal, three of the most stimulating chapters deal with Latin America. Jorge Díaz Ceballos examines maroon communities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Panama. They secured privileges and a measure of self-government by rebelling and resorting to armed self-defense but also by ably deploying European notions of loyalty and vassalage to play off competing imperial powers. Susana Elsa Aguirre discusses everyday forms of resistance among Indigenous men and women to secular and religious authorities in Buenos Aires. Their actions are typical of James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” but they are nonetheless fascinating for their uniqueness. Baptiste Bonnefoy recasts revolts, plots, and rumors in Venezuela between 1794 and 1799, which nationalist historiography presented as precursors of independence movements, as instead rooted in traditional political language of loyalty and the quest for justice and protection from bad government, typical of ordinary people across the early modern world. However, fearful of news and rumors about the Haitian Revolution, colonial authorities reinterpreted Venezuelan events as revolutionary to validate repressive measures.Rather than point to grand theories, the overall impression left by this varied collection of essays is that the concepts of resistance, violence, and police are perhaps too broad for sustained global comparisons. One may speak of shared early modern “culture” and “imaginaries” only in the broadest sense. Analysis requires grounding actions and words in specific times and places. In each instance, men and women of very different backgrounds adapted for their own needs and purposes a common lexicon and repertoire of physical gestures at once strange and not entirely unfamiliar to us.

Keeping Time

My first inclination to this prompt, what of Black temporalities in crisis, was to ask a small group of Black familiars (friends and colleagues) to talk with me about their current experience of time in quarantine, and under the present articulations of racial injustice and economic crisis. Many remarked on awaiting moments of dance and embodiment, or the body after surgery during COVID, to the forms of mutual aid arriving, just on time. Others expressed holding patterns of rage, when being called forth in work environments to engage in conversations about race, others of the crushing aftermath of an intimate partnership in quarantine that went awry, only to arrive at new forms of intimacy in self-reflection and community co-counseling, or deep expressions of freedom, when invited to social distance with a family member, and doing so outside clothing. Still others reflected on mourning a relative, loved one, distant friend, and the uncertainty of the living body, through measures that are within and outside of human control. As the call for this special issue of SAQ noted, “Black temporalities of crisis might consist of subtle, collective and individual experiences of anticipation, drawn-out boredom, acceleration, or the feeling that something has ended before something else begins, among other possibilities.” In this instance, I focus on how the stretchy drawn-out and quickening qualities of time in crisis persist. By drawing on the anonymous experiences of loved ones and moments of rebellion toward fugitivity (e.g., the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp and Harriet Jacobs’s neo–slave narrative), I ruminate on the in-between moments of Black life that show up in and around ongoing crisis.

‘A General Insurrection in the Countries with Slaves’: The US Civil War and the Origins of an Atlantic Revolution, 1861–1866

Abstract This article reveals how the beginning of US Reconstruction precipitated a revolutionary crisis in Cuba and Brazil, the last two slave societies in the Atlantic World. Throughout the US Civil War, slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil faced the immense challenge of containing black revolutionary currents across the Atlantic. Despite their intensive policing of black transnational networks, many slaves in Cuba and Brazil learned of the Civil War and became convinced that it heralded their emancipation. In response, they walked off plantations, fled to maroon communities, and organized and launched revolts. Although the scale of this insurrectionary violence never reached the same heights as in the Confederacy, the beginning of Reconstruction transformed the political implications of slave rebellion across the hemisphere. The fall of the Confederacy forced slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil to confront the possibility of their violent destruction at the same moment that the apparent radicalization of Republican politics stirred fears of US support for an international slave insurrection. It was in this context that many white elites in both nations became convinced of the necessity for a gradual abolition measure, which they hoped would ensure subaltern loyalty at a moment when revolutionary violence threatened the future of slavery.