Why am I passionate about this?
I am a social historian of the African Diaspora. I am passionate about writing stories that have never been told. The stories I uncover detail the lives, struggles, and resistance of enslaved people. I am interested in and have written about such overlooked topics as African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; Maroons in the American South; the experience of African Muslims enslaved throughout the Americas; and the lives of the people deported on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the US. Much still needs to be unearthed to help form a more comprehensive history of the people who, in countless and remarkable ways, fought against their subjugation.
Sylviane's book list on runaways and Maroons in the Americas
Why did Sylviane love this book?
This book is predominantly about Caribbean runaways and Maroons, with some brief forays into South America and the United States.
I found Thompson’s approach quite enlightening. Rather than studying marronage by country, as is usually the case, he chose an encompassing thematic approach across territories. He studies the topic in four major parts: the ideological bases of marronage, its origin and development, maroon organization, and the question of accommodation and revolution.
This panoramic view, which also offers a lot of details, helps point out commonalities but also differences between communities.
1 author picked Flight to Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
African slavery in the Americas has left indelible marks on the geographical, political, economic, social and cultural landscapes of the Americas. An important part of that indelibility is marronage that involved both flight from slavery and the establishment of free communities. This book is about the struggles of enslaved Africans in the Americas who achieved freedom through flight and the establishment of Maroon communities in the face of overwhelming military odds on the part of the slaveholders. Incontestably, Maroon communities constituted the first independent polities from European colonial rule in the hemisphere, even if the colonial states did not accord…