Slavery's exiles : the story of the American Maroons /
Over more than two centuries men, women and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina. They stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places. They buried themselves undergroun...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
New York University Press,
[2014]
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Over more than two centuries men, women and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina. They stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places. They buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of maroonage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing, their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | x, 393 pages, 13 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780814724378 (hbk. : alk. paper) 081472437X (hbk. : alk. paper) |