Fugitivities and Futures

Maroon Episteme

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century runaway advertisements hold potential for the study of marronnage and Black resistance, but they can be equally as disturbing as other archival sources in that they were written by plantation owners and were published widely with the specific purpose of tracking and re-enslaving runaways. To reclaim their fugitive “property,” enslavers gave accounts of maroons—oftentimes using derogatory language—to describe their sex and gender, physical characteristics, personality disposition, clothing, and other pieces of information such as financial bounties to incentivize the public to identify, capture, and return suspected fugitives. Brutality is evident when runaway advertisements offer brandings, missing limbs and labor-related injuries, or whipping scars as a customary part of slaves’ corporeal landscape. Enslaved women’s bodies especially carried the mark of physical and sexual violence in their own scars and in the very existence of the children (sometimes biological offspring of white enslavers) they sought to protect and nurture through marronnage.13 Rather than use archival sources and the emerging digital technologies that house them in ways that reify biased narratives or reduce the lived experiences of enslaved people to sterilized statistical data points, scholars of subaltern and oppressed communities and digital humanists are urged to read beyond the immediate texts and contexts of the sources by employing analytical perspectives that can envision the imaginary consciousness of those silenced by history without violating the boundaries of historical archives.14 This approach aligns with historian Vincent Brown’s idea of “going against the grain” of quantitative analysis in slavery studies during the current database age. As Brown points out, quantitative analysis can support the sociocultural interpretive tradition of Black studies and explain things the primary sources intended to conceal. Black radical intellectual and activist traditions thus can inform how scholars should engage slavery archives about marronnage, and the digital sphere more broadly, in meaningful ways.15

Advertisements for enslaved runaways contain information that provides a focused, albeit fleeting and speculative, look inside the minds of fugitives. We can look at the advertisements and discern ways maroons routinely violated the legal codes and social mores that heavily regulated and constrained enslaved people’s behavior. With access to digitized archival sources, we can foreground the experiences and lives of individual runaways and begin to give needed attention to aspects of their humanity, including their motivations for escape, their social networks, labor skills, or intended geographic destinations. For example, the Marronnage in the Atlantic World (Marronnage dans la monde atlantique), an online database and open-source resource covered by an Attribution-NonCommercial license, houses runaway advertisements published in colonial Haiti and other former French colonies.16 In the database, we find individuals like a valet and wigmaker named Julien who was born in Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) near the port city Cap-Français (now Cap-Haitien) and escaped his owner, Msr. Larralde, on February 11, 1776. The newspaper advertisement placed to surveil and recapture Julien also made mention of his mother, a free woman named Francoise-Jeanneton Taunier, who lived at Jacquezy, as well as his sister Marie-Jeanne, who also was a free woman living at Morne-au-Diable.17 While enslavers sought to exploit their knowledge of Julien’s labor skills and familial relationships as pertinent information to aid in locating and re-enslaving him, we can also interpret this information to understand how maroons may have leveraged their human and social capital to find safe haven. Maroons created solidarity and retained their social networks by escaping in dyads, triads, or even in groups of over a dozen; locating family members and other loved ones on different plantations or neighboring towns; joining established maroon settlements in geographical isolated areas; and at times seeking harbor with free people of color. Carrying arms or appropriating money, food, and clothing were actions that demonstrated absconders intended to successfully escape and survive the dangerous journeys beyond plantations. Some maroons claimed to be free by forging written passes or by disguising themselves in the garb of free people of color or as a person of the opposite sex. A person caught perpetrating such actions could face life-threatening punishments. The boldness and craftiness that was required to take such actions exemplifies attitudes of fearlessness and deliberate opposition to slave-holding society’s dominating conventions that restricted bondspeople.

I identified these behaviors associated with marronnage from content analysis of over 10,000 runaway slave advertisements that were published in colonial Haiti’s eighteenth-century newspaper Les Affiches américaines and are now digitally archived in the Marronnage in the Atlantic World (Marronnage dans la monde atlantique). With the liberty to share and adapt the materials housed in the site, web-scraping data collection techniques facilitated acquisition of the advertisement data. The intention was to use the data for research that could “liberate” marronnage studies from traditional methods that simply quantify runaways by population, gender, and ethnic demographics and, instead, opt for a methodology that merges qualitative and quantitative analyses to highlight how enslaved Africans and African descendants developed their own understandings of self and the world, social relationships, hopes for freedom, and tools of liberation. I considered each individual enslaved runaway as a participant in a microlevel protest and created variables for analysis by coding aspects of maroons’ behaviors described in the advertisements. Though there are shortcomings with the data, such as an underrepresentation of women and other missing information, the volume of runaways described in the advertisements allowed for quantitative analysis of maroons’ gender and racial or ethnic identities, their social networks, their geographic locations of origin, their suspected destinations, and their oppositional behaviors such as expropriating resources, bearing arms, or passing for free. I also coded the amount of time a runaway had been missing as a continuous scale variable measured in weeks.

With the data coded, I analyzed these categories with statistical tests of frequency distribution, association, and comparison using STATA computational software to examine marronnage patterns over time. For example, chi-square tests of association showed that Africa-born enslaved runaways were more likely to escape in groups than were “creoles” born in colonial Haiti, who were more likely to have had an existing kinship tie, a labor or linguistic skill, or other form of social or human capital to facilitate their escape, as in the case of the maroon Julien described above. Similarly, women were more likely than men to have been described as seeking haven with a family member, free people of color, or other enslaved people, underscoring the importance of social networks to women and children’s survival in a deadly slave society such as colonial Haiti. Lastly, chi-square tests also revealed a slow but steady increase in maroons’ attempts to remain at large for longer than six months in the years leading to the Haitian Revolution, suggesting the presence of a collective liberation consciousness that fed into the 1791 uprising.18

Maroons are generally regarded as people who either isolated “themselves from a surrounding society in order to create a fully autonomous community” or refashioned themselves and geographic spaces dedicated to slavery and oppression for their own purposes.19 Maroons are symbols of national heroism in places like Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and Suriname, where armed communities like the Windward and Leeward Maroons and the Palmares Kingdom mounted military resistance to colonial forces and forged zones of liberation amid expanding plantation societies. Traditions of these long-term maroon struggles and cultural heritages have been shared through oral histories, music, dance and martial art forms, poetry, fictional literature, archaeological findings, as well as claims to reparations for slavery, land rights, and self-governance.20 These legacies point to marronnage as not only a resistance tactic but a form of antislavery, anticolonial social thought and political theory. For Neil Roberts, the Haitian Revolution serves as an ideal type of “sovereign” marronnage—the country’s revolutionary act of flight from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world slave economy toward independence and sovereignty. At the microlevel, Roberts conceptualizes “sociogenic” marronnage as a community formation of shared social and political conditions as well as collective consciousness, rituals, and forms of communalism.21 Similarly, H. L. T. Quan imagines maroon communities’ collective “refusals to be governed as confirmation of democratic sensibility” as a model of resistance and a vision for living in possible futures: “the act of running away, or building independent communities . . . provides a way of knowing about life outside the state and other dominions.”22 These insights help to contextualize Black studies as a mode of inquiry that is grounded in the sociohistorical realities of resistance to racial slavery and informs further study of the Black experience in ways that emphasize Black freedom.

Black Studies as Fugitivity and the Digital Turn

Black studies was born of a tradition of fugitivity. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century thinkers, as well as 1960s student protesters and think tanks like the Institute of the Black World, individually and collectively eschewed the dominance of European-centered modes of scientific and humanistic thought, fostering distinctive intellectual spaces to produce new knowledge, research, and scholarship about the global Black experience. Both marginalized from the academy and taking part in acts of epistemological flight, the charter generation of Black studies scholars abandoned the boundaries of traditional disciplines, simultaneously drawing on tools from history, sociology, journalism, philosophy, anthropology, political science, and the cultural arts. They also rejected claims to objectivity, instead pronouncing their ideological and political commitment to and solidarity with the formerly enslaved and colonized Black peoples of the world. Their sense of obligation to dismantle racist institutions, end colonialism and racial terrorism, and contest the rise of scientific racism through research, writings, and activism made people like W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Edward Blyden, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Maria Stewart intellectuals of radical thought and action. These scholars’ works illuminated and theorized about the many facets of the Black Radical Tradition. The proliferation of the Black studies digital humanities arena, and the resulting online distribution of university resources in an era of increasing academic neoliberalism, might further represent what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe as the “maroon community of the university”—networks of subversive intellectuals using their privileged status to produce academic work and activism that disrupts the status quo.23

The digital turn portends new interpretations of “public scholarship” that dissolves boundaries between the wider world and the academy, where walls of elitism block public access to university libraries and specialized archives, academic journals, professional organizations and their annual or biannual conferences, and even coding skills and software programs. The Black studies tradition has infused a sociocultural tradition within the digital humanities field, which is often characterized by computation void of humanistic elements.24 Web-based visual projects, digitized archives, live-streamed conferences, academic blogs, and other endeavors engage wider audiences in new modes of knowledge production while linking scholars across disciplines, colleges and universities, and nation-state boundaries to engage in critical intellectual work. Individuals and collectives of scholars use hashtags like #Blktwitterstorians, #CiteBlackWomen, and #SlaveryArchive to speak to the nuanced experiences, contributions, and labor of Black scholars, particularly women, doing archival work on slavery and other subjects. Course syllabi such as the #LemonadeSyllabus, the #FergusonSyllabus, and the #CharlestonSyllabus provide academic peers and the public with resources to help contextualize and comprehend major cultural, social, or political events as they unfold in real time. Scholars converse about their archival findings and reflections on social media, organize working groups, and curate bibliographic blogs such as African Diaspora, PhD and Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, providing meta-archives of the most recent advances in research and knowledge production.

These peer-sharing efforts have also been met with an increased availability of digitized primary sources related to the enslavement of Africans and African descendants in early colonial societies. Collaborations between historians and programmers have transformed and translated archival documents into large datasets, such as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s database Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719–1820 and the Slave Societies Digital Archive directed by Jane Landers. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is a comprehensive archive of nearly all known voyages of the European slave trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been an extensively used resource for scholars studying a range of topics related to precolonial Africa, slavery, and the Atlantic world. Records from the U.S. Reconstruction era are housed in the Freedom Bureau Project, a digital portal that allows users to browse materials in search of antebellum-era ancestors.25 Most recently, the MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU) initiated Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade, an online data hub to link collections from multiple universities, allowing users to search through millions of pieces of data about enslaved Africans and their descendants from a single source.26 These materials have helped scholars understand the qualitative and quantitative nature of enslaved people’s patterns of forced migration to the Americas, the composition of their African origins, their kinship and network formations, and modes of survival in “New World” colonial plantation societies. Access to these types of materials is not only helpful for scholars and citizen historians, students, and educators to gain better understanding of slavery and colonialism, but actual descendants of enslaved people can use these resources for genealogical research that can potentially support individual and collective claims to reparations.27

The convergence of Black protest and intellectual traditions, combined with developments in the digital humanities and turns toward public history, has created space for new and creative approaches to analyzing resistance to slavery using digitized archival materials. Online resources can highlight enslaved people’s rebellions in novel ways, like Vincent Brown’s interactive map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative, depicting the spatial unfolding of Tacky’s Revolt using materials such as primary source newspapers, maps, and journals.28 Runaway slave advertisements that were published in colonial-era newspapers are increasingly a subject of digitization as several databases have emerged in recent years. The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements, 1750–1840, developed at University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery in Virginia, and the Twitter-based Adverts 250 Project house runaway advertisements that give educators, students, and researchers alike the capability to browse, analyze, and code historical documents related to enslaved African descendants’ individual and collective resistance efforts—possibilities previously only available to seasoned academics and archivists.29

Additionally, these resources can allow the study of microlevel action during periods of macrolevel social change and transformation. In my undergraduate course Slavery, Racism, Colonialism in the African Diaspora at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I highlighted an advertisement published in January 1778 in New Bern, North Carolina, for a woman named Carolina, who was “supposed to be harboured [sic] by the negroes of Col. John Patten in Beaufort County” to accompany students’ reading of Julius Scott’s The Common Wind and to help them connect microhistories to broader patterns of maroon resistance during the Age of Revolutions.30 Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move crowdsources volunteer transcribers and coders to bolster the site’s searchability and provides resources for K–12 educators to incorporate the runaway advertisement materials into classroom settings while reflecting on how the historical archives reproduce power and violence. These databases, as well as the Fugitive Slave Database by scholars at the University of Bristol, primarily focus on advertisements for enslaved runaways in the Cotton Belt region of the U.S. South. Other projects expand the geographical scope of fugitivity to include areas that are often excluded in conversations about enslavement, such as the Texas Runaway Slave Project, Runaway Connecticut, and the Documenting Runaway Slaves Project, which seeks to highlight the southern United States as well as the Caribbean and Brazil. Other projects based outside the United States include the previously mentioned Marronnage in the Atlantic World (Marronnage dans la monde atlantique) database from the French Atlantic History Group, which compiles advertisements from French Caribbean and North American colonies, and Runaway Slaves in Britain, which gives insight to the thousands of people of African, Asian, and Indigenous American descent enslaved in eighteenth-century Britain.

Historians Vincent Brown and Jessica Marie Johnson advise that researchers be cautiously attentive to the ways in which digitized archival sources and their respective technological apparatuses can take for granted, concretize, and reinforce white enslavers’ biases and acts of violence.31 Most of the available primary sources related to enslavement in the Atlantic world come from colonial planters who owned and exploited enslaved people, slavery apologists, traffickers of captives, and brokers who inscribed their racist interpretations of Africans into the very documents—maps, plantation inventories, slave trading records, shipping logs, personal journals and notes, and runaway slave advertisements—that researchers currently use to reconstruct narratives of enslaved people’s lives. Bondspeople were not regarded as human beings but as chattel property who were described in records with the same level of status as an animal or a piece of furniture. Enslavement prescribed a “social death” of alienation from kith and kin, cultural heritage, social and political rights and liberties, or economic freedoms.32 Without social, economic, or political protections from dehumanization, white enslavers’ and plantation overseers’ violence and brutality toward enslaved people was quotidian. Saidiya Hartman reminds us that “scandal and excess inundate the archive” with horrifying accounts of Black deaths, rapes, and illnesses.33 Indifference to Black humanity and the violent denial of it “determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery” and “creates subjects and objects of power.”34 The runaway slave advertisement archive, however, is an opportunity for scholars to deviate from witnessing the violence embedded in slavery records, an intellectual marronnage if you will, and to assume the perspective of those who rejected their reality of violent slavery by risking their lives to escape. Histories of marronnage can lend to our understanding of contemporary and future resistance tactics; however, the insights from Hartman, Johnson, and Brown remind us that the print and digital technologies that allow us to study marronnage are the very apparatuses of capital accumulation, surveillance, and capture that rebels are trying to escape.

Maroon Futures

This chapter presents a framework connecting marronnage to broader forms of collective action that demonstrates how insights about the use of digitized advertisements, which were intended to preserve slavery by surveilling and tracking runaways, can be used to interpret Black agency and meaningful human processes that challenge enslavers’ original intentions. Maroon agency, grounded in the experience of enslaved Africans and their wide-ranging forms of resistance to bondage, might serve as pillars for contemporary and future collective actions that reject the racial oppression and economic exploitation embedded in global capitalism.35 Public engagement with runaways, their self-articulations of humanity, and their pursuits for freedom—precarious as it may have been—portend inspiration for social justice activists and others attempting to carve out social, geographic, economic, political, and digital spaces that will allow them to flourish in their being and challenge institutions of anti-Blackness.36 What does marronnage look like in the age of information and big data; the age of digital turns; the age of hypercapitalism, unprecedented wealth disparities, and widespread precarity; the age of climate change; the age of surveillance and mass incarceration—and what type of revolutionary potentiality does it hold? Based on historical study of the characteristics and principles of marronnage that I described above, I have developed a framework for identifying and understanding Black resistance both in and through computational spaces that may transcend the historical connotation of flight.

These tenets include, but may not be limited to

• reclamation of the Black self as a commodified source of capital, and redirection of time, energy, and effort toward individual, familial, or collective needs and interests;
• creation of solidarity networks of people who share social position and liberatory goals;
• networks characterized by movement or transience, having network nodes that are linked by women;
• appropriation and subversion of material goods and technologies that are typically used as apparatuses of racial capitalism;
• experiencing geographic, social, economic, and political marginalization, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement from centers of power and capital yet creating spaces organized around communal principles;
• coded forms of communication and systems of protection to enhance solidarity and to avoid surveillance or betrayal by those whose socioeconomic mobility hinges on figurative or literal forms of re-enslavement;
• drawing on intimate knowledge of land, space, and local ecologies for survival;
• development of rituals to orient collective consciousness, to affirm collective identity, and to build solidarity;
• reimagining, rejecting, and traversing hegemonic identities, gender norms, and sociopolitical borders;
• developing self-defense or direct-action fighting techniques and tactics, such as martial arts, bearing arms, or adopting militaristic strategies to contest repression;
• disruption of capital accumulation processes that extract resources from Black spaces.

To briefly highlight solidarity networks and traversing hegemonic identities, for example, U.S. and Canadian Black women and transgendered prison abolitionists liken their work to the tactics of maroons, such as rejecting the language of state-sanctioned emancipation, opting for prison abolition, and building “black-brown” coalitions with Native American activists—not unlike historical maroons of African and Indigenous origin in places like Haiti, Florida, and Cuba. These anti-prison activists were motivated by survival imperatives and analogies between plantation slavery and the carceral state, while rejecting heteronormative gender identity and relying on spiritual sensibilities that supported their identities and ideologies.37 Such activities also harken to figures like Magdeleine, an enslaved woman in colonial Haiti who fled her owner disguised as a man to join her lover Hyacinthe, a ritualist and rebel leader who led thousands during the Haitian Revolution.38

For historical maroons, freedom was precarious at best, and they were almost always vulnerable to either violent repression or re-enslavement. Evidence of this continued subjugation is found in the direct linkages between antebellum-era fugitive slave police, post-emancipation sharecropping labor, Jim Crow laws and convict leasing, and the present-day carceral state.39 But rather than rely solely on brute force repression against insurgents, contemporary government and nongovernment entities also include covert, technology-based forms of repression such as misinformation, infiltration, and surveillance and sabotage, which seem to have been effective tactics to undermine Black mobilizations. Infiltration happens when online forums that are designated as “safe” spaces are trolled or “Zoombombed,” not only by those with white supremacist leanings but by anonymous posters using “digital blackface” to delegitimize, dominate, and redirect conversations dedicated to antiracist dialogue, teaching, and organizing.40 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) honed its counterintelligence programming by systematically undermining Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the same program that was later weaponized against members of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Republic of New Africa.41 FBI surveillance of Black protesters, including monitoring their online activity, erroneously labels them as domestic terrorists—dubbed “Black Identity Extremists” whose anger over the 2014 killing of Michael Brown and other acts of state-sanctioned violence allegedly “spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.”42 Further, the National Security Agency has collected an assortment of raw and metadata from an untold number of our phone calls, emails, and Facebook posts for unknown purposes.43 Combined with recent challenges to the Fourth Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court, there is a high likelihood of increased racially driven police contacts based on questionably obtained information such as cellular phone records.44

The historically grounded and metaphorical state of liminality in marronnage can translate to twenty-first-century conceptions of fugitivity and has real-life implications for subversive collective actions, given ongoing transformations and adaptations of anti-Black institutions, economic modalities, and methods of re-enslaving Black people. The need for transformative subversion of state invasiveness using digital technology likely will come from mobilizers at the microlevel who, like maroons, use a range of resistance tactics to challenge and expose the contradictions of oppression and exploitation. Black people have “subverted or remixed dominant technologies using local (cultural) practices” to produce artifacts of tangible and intangible culture such as hair braiding patterns, musical forms, and artistic pieces created with discarded materials.45 More specifically, Simone Browne offers “dark sousveillance” as a “site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance” and reverses the watchful anti-Black gaze from activists to state apparatuses.46 Black Lives Matter protesters’ use of “cop watching” and video activism using camera phones has been an effective countersurveillance tool in revealing police misconduct and advancing broader conversations about social movements against racial inequality.47 Cellular phone cameras, street cameras, and police “badge cams” bore witness to the deaths of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Keith Lamont Scott in ways that were previously inaccessible. Similarly, the Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation used drones or “aerial sousveillance” to document human rights violations and to provide counternarratives to police accounts of their actions.48 Dark sousveillance has appeared in several other forms, such as hacking and leaking confidential documents that reveal racially motivated targeting of organizers, opposing repressive legislation, and fighting carceral expansion.49 Other social movement activists employ tactics of secrecy, such as encrypting emails or changing cellular phone SIM cards to avoid surveillance—methods that are reminiscent of the ways fugitive slaves protected maroons communities with code words and alternative means of communication.50

Still, surveillance technologies, when in the control of the state and privately owned militarized entities, place limits on the effectiveness of less sophisticated video evidence from activists and have the potential power to thwart Black radical activism and societal civil liberties by magnifying “existing social control functions . . . [and] capital accumulation imperatives” in unprecedented ways.51 These seemingly bleak realities portend important questions for the future of fugitivity and for the role of scholars—especially digital humanists—in analyzing past, present, and future archives related to Black life. A Black digital humanities approach inherently involves fugitivity as a critique of structural inequalities and the technological platforms on which they rely, and as a mode of data analysis that seeks to free those bound by historical, present, and future archives. Marronnage was based on aspirations and struggles for freedom from hegemonic conceptions of Blackness and economically exploitative and oppressive practices that result in anti-Black outcomes, pointing toward an Afrofuture that “is explicitly antifacist insofar as it provides an imaginary domain for radical democratic politics and life-forms outside of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy.”52 The digital humanities can stand in solidarity with social justice efforts by employing notions of Black fugitivity as a uniquely Black studies approach to recognize collective consciousness and Black agency embedded in data sources and technological platforms otherwise marked by slavery, racial oppression, and death.

Notes

1. 1. Everett, “The Revolution Will Be Digitized”; Fleming and Morris, “Theorizing Ethnic and Racial Movements.”

2. 2. Greene-Hayes and James, “Cracking the Codes,” 68; “Black Lives Matter Everywhere,” World Policy Journal.

3. 3. Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

4. 4. Browne, Dark Matters; Benjamin, Race after Technology; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.

5. 5. For comparative overviews on marronnage in the Atlantic world, see Heuman, Out of the House of Bondage; Price, Maroon Societies; Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade; Thompson, Flight to Freedom.

6. 6. See chapter 11 in this volume by Holden and Rothman.

7. 7. Browne, Dark Matters.

8. 8. Robinson, Black Marxism.

9. 9. Noble, “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities.”

10. 10. Cottom, “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet”; Hammer and Park, “Ghost in the Algorithm”; Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery.

11. 11. Gallon, “Making a Case.”

12. 12. Quan, “‘It’s Hard to Stop Rebels,’” 184.

13. 13. Miki, “Fleeing into Slavery”; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Eddins, “‘Rejoice!’”

14. 14. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”; Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt”; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Johnson, “Black [Life] Studies.”

15. 15. Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt”; Brown, “Designing Histories of Slavery”; Johnson, “Black [Life] Studies.”

16. 16. Marronnage dans la monde atlantique (Marronnage in the Atlantic World) can be accessed at http://marronnage.info/fr/index.html.

17. 17. Les Affiches américaines, February 24, 1776, accessed February 24, 2021, http://www.marronnage.info/fr/document.php?id=255.

18. 18. Eddins, “Runaways, Repertoires, and Repression”; Eddins, “‘Rejoice!’”

19. 19. Roberts, Freedom as Marronnage, 4; Miki, “Fleeing into Slavery.”

20. 20. Césaire, “Le verbe marronner”; Price, Alabi’s World; Bilby, True-Born Maroons; White, “Maroon Archaeology”; Planas, “Brazil’s ‘Quilombo’ Movement.”

21. 21. Roberts, Freedom as Marronnage, ch. 3–4.

22. 22. Quan, “‘It’s Hard to Stop Rebels,’” 182.

23. 23. Robinson, Black Marxism; Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26.

24. 24. Gallon, “Making a Case.”

25. 25. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719–1820, can be accessed at http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/; Jane Landers’ Slave Societies Digital Archive can be accessed at https://slavesocieties.org/; the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database can be accessed at https://www.slavevoyages.org/.

26. 26. “MSU Uses $1.5M Mellon Foundation Grant,” MSU Today.

27. 27. Darity, “Forty Acres and a Mule.”

28. 28. Vincent Brown’s “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative,” can be accessed at http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html.

29. 29. Several other runaway advertisement databases are enumerated in Eddins, “On the Lives of Fugitives.”

30. 30. North Carolina Gazette, January 16, 1778, accessed January 11, 2024, https://dlas.uncg.edu/notices/notice/1716/.

31. 31. Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt”; Johnson, “Black [Life] Studies.”

32. 32. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

33. 33. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 5.

34. 34. Hartman, 10.

35. 35. Robinson, Black Marxism, ch. 6–7.

36. 36. Saucier and Woods, “What is the danger.”

37. 37. Sudbury, “Maroon Abolitionists.”

38. 38. Les Affiches américaines, November 11, 1790, accessed March 11, 2021, http://www.marronnage.info/fr/document.php?id=10791; Fick, The Making of Haiti, 139.

39. 39. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Spruill, “Slave Patrols.”

40. 40. Jackson, “Memes and Misogynoir”; Lorenz and Alba, “‘Zoombombing.’”

41. 41. Davenport, How Social Movements Die.

42. 42. FBI, “Black Identity Extremists,” 2; Speri, “The FBI Spends a Lot of Time.”

43. 43. “FAQ: What You Need to Know about the NSA’s Surveillance Programs,” ProPublica.

44. 44. Sorkin, “In Carpenter Case.”

45. 45. Gaskins, “Techno-Vernacular Creativity,” 252.

46. 46. Browne, Dark Matters, 21.

47. 47. Canella, “Racialized Surveillance.”

48. 48. Schnepf, “Unsettling Aerial Surveillance.”

49. 49. Berger, “Mapping Resistance to Surveillance.”

50. 50. Leistert, “Resistance against Cyber-Surveillance.”

51. 51. Monahan, “Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention?” 516.

52. 52. Quan, “‘It’s Hard to Stop Rebels,’” 191.

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