Uprooting Enslavement: Agro-Forests of Marronage in Amazonian Waterscapes

• In Event: Afro-Brazilian Waterways and the Black Atlantic I - Diaspora: Ancestrality and Emancipation in Waters

Description for Program

Recurrently ignored by Luso-Brazilian authorities, African and Afro-Amazonian peoples upended the trope of an impenetrable rainforest back already in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Where imperial state-building did not reach their emancipatory politics only challenged the institution of slavery but also weakened imperial sovereignties at a local and international level. This paper seeks to understand the role of African and Afro-Amazonians in the diversification of agriculture and transport activities in Grão-Pará, the appropriation of their geographic knowledge into imperial cartography, and how they repurposed these knowledges to the advantage of Maroon territories. By inheriting lands in plantation grounds, running away to remote and inaccessible landscapes, and allying with Indigenous nations, Afro-Amazonians reimagined and reinvented an initial foreign environment into a domesticated ecology for self and collective emancipation, changing traditional narratives of land occupation and ethnicity in the Amazon.

Author

• Manoel Rendeiro Neto, Yale University