Neil Roberts > Quotes

“Fanon and James dared theorists of freedom to cast aside old enslaving norms, work out new concepts, and set afoot a new imaginative humanism in regions Prospero never knew. Freedom as marronage is one answer to this challenge.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Grand marronage refers to the mass flight of individuals from slavery to form an autonomous community of freedom emphasizing physical escape, geographic isolation, rejection of property relations associated with a slavery regime, and avoidance of sustained states of war through compacts, treaties, and negotiations for political recognition. These “maroon societies,” as Richard Price notably calls them, work against a fleeting temporality. They are forged through flight intended to sustain an ongoing community with defined borders.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“We must come to terms with the meaning of freedom externally by recognizing the actuality of human plurality, “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Like the architects of the fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition and the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood), causing Jews from Spain and Portugal to flee to the Caribbean, the Code Noir defines Jews and conversos of Jewish descent as beyond saving. The logics of anti-Semitism and antiblack racism, seemingly differentiated by religious and secular discourses, converge in the political philosophy of white supremacy and the disposition of bad faith.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Toussaint affirms an irreconcilable contradiction: flight is to occur alongside an inalienable freedom that, as his own descriptions attest, is actually not a given but struggled for and fought over. Toussaint conceives freedom to be inalienable once acquired, but this admission disturbs the freedom as natality narrative. Freedom is not immutable. Flight is first experienced after bondage and is not an originary naturalism. Toussaint has a late realization of the nonuniversal quality of revolutionary republicanism, the rift between the self-reflexive hero and the crowd desiring the hero to put them ahead of the sovereign self, and conflict between the Haitian state and the Haitian nation with the latter’s non-sovereign conception of freedom.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“The symbol of Louis XIV, the fleur-de-lis branded on a runaway was to be a physical reminder of sovereignty and the limits of moral and legal altruism. Flight infringed on ancien régime doctrine and mores. Flight was a doctrine refusing transcendental indoctrination. Recurrent flight in the era of the Code Noir was sure death. Political orders premised on the juridical paradox eventually became insolvent.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Who were the first persons to get the unusual idea that being free was not only a value to be cherished but the most important thing that someone could possess? The answer, in a word: slaves. Freedom began its career as a social value in the desperate yearning of the slave to negate what, for him or her, and for nonslaves, was a peculiarly inhuman condition. —Orlando Patterson, Freedom”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“The teleology of maroon societies is unequivocal in spite of challenges to their formation and longevity: freedom as existence away from slavocracy in the farthest, hardest to reach expanses of states.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“The junction marks an opportunity, what Edwidge Danticat calls the site of dangerous creation.4 The outcome: an experience of friction, resistance, and movement. The traversing of future frontiers brings with it efforts to imagine and experience freedom irreducible to self or sovereign.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Flight is multidimensional, constant, and never static.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Petit marronage was the type of flight that posed the greatest problem for planters on a daily basis, and it is an activity of subjectivity, not intersubjectivity, for it revolves around an individual agent attaining control of property and being of self. It is an imminent philosophy that does not have on its cartography of freedom the vision of collective agents.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Struggles among Roman patricians, plebeians, and slaves produced a version of the chordal triad universalized around a notion of libertas. Different notes of the chord were dominant from the Republic to the Empire. The slave’s point of view was made prominent in the figure of Epictetus, one of the few major Roman theorists born a slave. By the Middle Ages, freedom had attained a spiritual dimension but was still linked to the political. With medieval Christendom came the triumph of the sovereignal conception of freedom. That triumph coincided with theocratic societal decadence, the doctrine of heresy, the transformation of mass slavery into the political language of serfdom, and the introduction of the root word Slav to refer to serfs across Europe. Heretics privileged their personal freedom over sovereign orthodoxy. Being burned at the stake was a consequence.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“If Makandal was feared when alive, he became even more of a threat to masters after death. Makandal claimed that he could transform into a fly, and cries of “Makandal saved” were shouted during his execution ceremony. That public speech act created the image of Makandal as a transcendent resister to slavery, forever reappearing throughout space and time like a specter, heralding a freedom to come.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“Sovereign marronage is a philosophy of freedom referring to non-fleeting mass flight from slavery on a scale much larger than grand marronage. Its goal is emancipation, its scope is social-structural, its spatialization is polity-wide, its metaphysics includes the individual and community, and its medium is the lawgiver.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage