Oathbound: The Trelawny Maroons of Jamaica in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

Abstract

“Oathbound: The Trelawny Maroons of Jamaica in the Revolutionary Atlantic World” narrates the formation of Jamaica's Trelawny Maroons and their subsequent migration to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone in order to reconsider the political history of the Atlantic world. The dissertation is structured around crucial points of contact between the Maroons and the British—treaties, blood oaths, promises, petitions, and gestures of refusal—that illuminate the entanglements of diasporic and imperial epistemologies in the Maroons' exodus through the British Empire. I argue that the Maroons' strategies of diplomacy sutured the ritual politics of diaspora to the legal rituals of empire, allowing the Maroons to recast their collective identity in different colonial contexts. Although studies of Jamaican Maroons tend to characterize them as accommodators to empire who opportunistically invoked deference to monarchy, I eschew the normative categories of British imperial history that have framed their story and instead emphasize the intellectual and legal pluralism of the Atlantic world. This approach, I suggest, offers an alternative genealogy of the black radical imagination oriented away from the pursuit of liberal freedoms and the wielding of state power toward contingent and improvisational forms of kinship and belonging.