Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons - Hardcover

Diouf, Sylviane A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081472437X ISBN 13: 9780814724378

Publisher: NYU Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas—named Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999—both with NYU Press. Her book Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America received the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2009 Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies and the co-editor of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, Diouf is a Curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Review:

"With impressive research and vivid prose, Diouf directs our attention to maroons within the United States. From the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia to the frontier regions of Louisiana, she shows, fugitive slaves managed to survive without fleeing to the North. An important addition to our understanding of slave society and black resistance."-Eric Foner,author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

"Diouf persuasively captures the quiet heroism of North American maroons. Less dramatic and long-lived than many of the maroon communities in Suriname, Jamaica, or Brazil, those in the southern United States were nonetheless ever present. Diouf demonstrates how much freedom mattered to the enslaved and how, within the limited possibilities open to them, those that set off into the inhospitable swamps and forests managed to forge a new life beyond the authority of whitefolks."-Richard Price,author of Maroon Societies

"Diouf has scoured archives across the United States, examining accounts of fugitives throughout the Slave South to uncover the hidden history of American maroons, and produced a highly readable, original study that deserves a broad scholarly and popular audience."-Journal of the Civil War Era

"This extensively and thoroughly researched study brings to light a little-known aspect of slavery in the United States . . . a fascinating read. Diouf has done a brilliant job of illuminating a complicated, multifaceted, important, yet little-known piece of black American history."-Annette Madden,The Baobab Tree

"In contrast to the study of slavery elsewhere, six decades of research in the United States has systematically bypassed the issue of marronage. Sylviane Diouf’s exhaustive research has not only brought the subject to center stage, it offers a framework for recasting the study of runaway slaves throughout the Americas. This is one of those rare books that is at once of scholarly significance and will engage a wide readership."-David Eltis,Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University

"[T]he stories are riveting. Readers will become familiar with colorful characters like Captain Cudjoe of Jamaica or the man nicknamed 'Forest' for his skill at hiding, and they will learn surprising facts about maroons’ participation in trade and defense, along with horrific details of punishments . . . . [I]t’s a notable document for its treatment of the subject."-Publishers Weekly

"In writing that is deeply informative, with vivid anecdotes when available, including horrors of punishment enacted when maroons were captured, this book is recommended to those wishing to pursue the study of American slavery beyond more general texts."-Library Journal

"In a book that is easily accessible yet rigorously researched, analyzed, and argued, Diouf has made a compelling case that scholars of slavery and of early American history must consider the presence of maroons in the U.S. with a sense of renewed urgency. As she so eloquently and brilliantly shows, maroons exhibited a form of self-determined, autonomy-seeking resistance to slavery that complicates our understanding of fugitivity and freedom as they are generally bound up in a North/South, free/unfree binaristic imaginary."-Journal of the Early Republic

"Slavery's Exiles covers an interesting and important topic that few people are aware existed. It is filled with fascinating individuals and remarkable acts of bravery.  Hopefully Slavery's Exiles will spur more interest in the subject of American maroons."-Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Sylviane A. Diouf has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of enslaved people's lives with her study of the maroons in the American South. Slavery's Exiles dispels the myth that maroon communities only existed in places such as the Caribbean and Brazil, firmly placing the maroons of mainland North America within larger discussions of slave resistance."-The North Carolina Historical Review

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 081472437X
• ISBN 13: 9780814724378
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 403