A World Between Two Lives: Spiritual Coordinates of Slave Fugitivity in Barbados

• In Event: Enslaved Insurrection

Description for Program

Conventional formulations of slave resistance tend to privilege the subversion of physical space, and often invites us to imagine the landscapes forged to counter the spatial and geographic ubiquity of the plantation. Mobilizing Barbados as a site of inquiry, especially considering its relative oceanic distance as the easternmost Caribbean island and the historical mass deforestation underway by the mid seventeenth century, I ponder at the maritime and terrestrial impasse the island’s geography presented for marronage spanning the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. If the spatial coordinates of resistance proved frustrating for the sustained development of counter territories, I intend to recast fugitivity as a mode of being that could operate in plain sight of colonial authority. Tracing resistance cartography beyond the binary of petit or grand marronage, I underscore the ways ritual and spiritual practices, particularly Obeah, might signal a mapping that relied on ecological relation to the island and simultaneously disrupted its repressive geographic arrangement. Attending to these spatial strictures I attempt to render the enslaved fugitive an agent both in the colonial logics of spatiotemporality and beyond through Africana spiritual consciousness, where the possibility of living metaphysically uncaptured could reverberate beyond Barbados’ interior and oceanic isolation.

Author

• Amir Curry, Emory University