Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the political history of the Atlantic world. To tell the story of the Trelawny Maroons is to tell a characteristically Atlantic story whereby different groups reconstituted their sense of belonging in the face of flux and dislocation—an impulse common to Africans, indigenous Americans, and Europeans alike from the onset of the Atlantic age of exploration. War, enslavement, mercantilism, and imperial expansion facilitated the meeting of strangers and the making of kin. At the center of these Atlantic narratives are shared strivings—often violent, yet always creative—to persist in a world marked by rupture and discontinuity. I argue that the Maroons engaged in a radical worldmaking project rooted in an Atlantic political culture of oath-making that allowed them to recast their political subjectivity across different colonial spaces. The Maroons endeavored to bind themselves to a radical vision of fragmented sovereignty and a sense of diasporic community, revealing the deep historical connections between sovereignty and intimacy. By adopting a diasporic emphasis on ritual, materiality, and belonging, this project reorients a historiography of Black Atlantic revolutionary politics that too often emerges from a linear, progressive, and state-oriented perspective.

This event will be online only via Zoom.  Please use this URL to RSVP:  https://ucla.in/3zy9clB.