5 - Marronnage as Reclamation

Summary

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.