Promotional Information

Their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 The Development of Marronage in the South 2 African Maroons 3 Borderland Maroons 4 Daily Life at the Borderlands 5 Hinterland Maroons 6 The Maroons of Bas du Fleuve, Louisiana: From the Borderlands to the Hinterland 7 The Maroons of Belleisle and Bear Creek 8 The Great Dismal Swamp 9 The Maroon Bandits 10 Maroons, Conspiracies, and Uprisings 11 Out of the Wilds Conclusion Notes Select BibliographyIndex About the Author

About the Author

Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas—named Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999—both with NYU Press. Her book Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America received the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2009 Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies and the co-editor of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, Diouf is a Curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Reviews

"Diouf persuasively captures the quiet heroism of North American maroons. Less dramatic and long-lived than many of the maroon communities in Suriname, Jamaica, or Brazil, those in the southern United States were nonetheless ever present. Diouf demonstrates how much freedom mattered to the enslaved and how, within the limited possibilities open to them, those that set off into the inhospitable swamps and forests managed to forge a new life beyond the authority of whitefolks." -Richard Price, author of Maroon Societies "With impressive research and vivid prose, Diouf directs our attention to maroons within the United States. From the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia to the frontier regions of Louisiana, she shows, fugitive slaves managed to survive without fleeing to the North. An important addition to our understanding of slave society and black resistance." -Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery "In contrast to the study of slavery elsewhere, six decades of research in the United States has systematically bypassed the issue of marronage. Sylviane Diouf's exhaustive research has not only brought the subject to center stage, it offers a framework for recasting the study of runaway slaves throughout the Americas. This is one of those rare books that is at once of scholarly significance and will engage a wide readership." -David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University