Marronage as Methodology

Abstract

Marronage, the practice of escaping bondage from slavery, is an inherently spatial practice. Maroons, or fugitive slaves, understood their environments as fluid, multilayered, and inseparable from the land; they superimposed multiple forms of spatial knowledge in order to communicate with one another, find cover for social and spiritual rituals, organize work stoppages and other labor tactics, and to navigate the world both inside and outside the plantation. Historians, geographers, and other scholars have used marronage as a conceptual tool to illustrate the political and topographic importance of spatial autonomy for fugitive groups, both in the context of chattel slavery in the Americas and in other historical and geographical contexts. Understanding marronage as a methodology or mode of inquiry for any discipline means examining inherited tools and methods, questioning who has wielded them to what ends, and learning ways that we might use them differently.

Despite their utility, or perhaps because of it, architectural drawing conventions neutralize the potential political and social agency of architecture as such. If architecture has been acknowledged to be complicit with histories of white supremacy and imperial conquest, architects today require a different set of methodologies to overcome the politically neutralizing function of our inherited drawing conventions. Marronage as methodology opens up the possibility for architects to challenge and subvert the logics of enclosure and domination that inform both drawing and building today.

By examining a firsthand narrative of marronage in Alabama alongside archival building records from 18th- and 19th-century Cambridge, how can we uncover spatialized histories from the margins and reorient architectural practice away from rigid material and symbolic hierarchies and toward mobility, mutualism, and liberation?