Slavery's Exiles : : The Story of the American Maroons / / Sylviane A. Diouf.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Diouf, Sylviane A.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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 marronage 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction -- 1. The Development of Marronage in the South -- 2. African Maroons -- 3. Borderland Maroons -- 4. Daily Life at the Borderlands -- 5. Hinterland Maroons -- 6. The Maroons of Bas du Fleuve, Louisiana: From the Borderlands to the Hinterland -- 7. The Maroons of Belleisle and Bear Creek -- 8. The Great Dismal Swamp -- 9. The Maroon Bandits -- 10. Maroons, Conspiracies, and Uprisings -- 11. Out of the Wilds -- CONCLUSION -- NOTES -- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR