In the Wake of Maritime Marronage

Abstract

This article delves into the experiences of maritime maroons to critically fabulate the life of Mattadore, an eighteenth-century enslaved fisherman who fled captivity in St. Croix. Drawing from Christina Sharpe’s framework of analyzing Black life ‘in the wake’, this article envisions Black sociality from the wake of maritime marronage. Through the process of flight, maritime maroons produced alternative geographies on the sea where they refused the status of slavery and became prominent socio-political actors in the colonial era. Such a conceptualization centres the ocean as a critical space of Black geographic and historical worldmaking. Often overlooked as a site of metamorphosis, it was on the sea where Africans were first transformed from free into enslaved and again transfigured from enslaved into free, never fully complete in either process. Finally, this article challenges the categorizations of ‘petit’ and ‘grand’ marronage as ineffective at explaining the full range of complexities of maritime maroon experiences and motivations.