F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Maroon Spaces—Orrieann Florius's Graduate Colloquium

This afternoon I had the wonderful opportunity to hear HU's own Orrie Florius speak about maroon spaces in the works of contemporary Caribbean fiction. The part of her talk that interested me most was her investigation of marronage as more than just a physical practice of resistance wherein enslaved people fled to create their own sustainable communities high in the mountains where they were safe from the violence of the plantation. In her discussion of Marlon James' Book of Night Women and V.S. Naipaul's A House For Mr Biswas, Florius argues that Caribbean authors also make use of a psychological, metaphysical manifestation of marronage as means of personal and collective resistance to the psychic traumas inflicted by the legacies of slavery. Most immediately, this made me think of Jordon Peele's recent film, Get Out, as it also relies on a discussion of psychic, interior spaces as it relates to the experience of African diasporic peoples. However, unlike Florius's theorization about metaphyscial marronage, Peele's movie relies upon the inverted notion of a safe psychic space—known as the sunken place. While at first these two conceptions of interiority seemed unrelated, after longer thought, I have come to think of them as two sides of the same coin. The major difference between the two ideas mainly centers on control and embodiment. While psychological marronage might exhibit tendencies of escape, the sunken place is instilled in a subject so that their humanity becomes almost psychically disconnected from their embodied experience. In some ways, this also reminds me a of Sadiya Hartman's discussion of subjectivity in Scenes of Subjection. There, she takes a stance that views the process of subject-making, the process by which formerly enslaved peoples fashioned identities and humanity, paradoxically tied to the discourses of rationality, science, and liberal exclusionism that once targeted black people. In a way, the dichotomy between Peele's and Floruis's concepts of psychic space revolves around this notion of humanism—and whether or not on is being abjected from the category, or if one willing flees to create wholly new ideas of what constitutes their own existence and the limits of their own subjectivity. 

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