Obscuring Fugitivity: Swamplands and Eco-Esotericism

• In Event: Black and Indigenous Ecologies: Race, Place, and the Politics of Water

Description for Program

Historical, anthropological, and archaeological records detail Native Americans and Negro slaves in the New World who escaped from European settlements as early as the 1600s to seek refuge in swamps, marshes, and rivers along the Southeastern coast of North America. Historical archaeologists and wildlife conservationists acknowledge the sheer effort that went into fugitive communities’ attempts to root their livelihood in an environment that seemed incompatible with standard human living conditions. The ‘impenetrable wilderness’ made archaeological discovery of the fugitive communities difficult. Furthermore, the societies borne out of the impetus to escape slave plantations kept their locations and practices secret in order to avoid re-enslavement. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, equipped with forensic and scientific methods, have sought to uncover these hidden knowledge systems and mirco-habitats. This essay resists the investigative scientific approach and instead adopts a speculative-philosophical examination of the religious practices and survival tactics preserved by black and indigenous maroon communities of the Florida swamps. As James H. Sweet argues, African diasporic communities purposely obscured ritual healing practices in the Atlantic World; I take up this line of argument in my essay through the lens of philosophical esotericism to demonstrate a core epistemological tenet of maroon communities who sought refuge in swamplands - namely, secrecy and unknowability. Not only were the habitats of these fugitive communities secluded from common navigation, and thus became undiscoverable terrain, but their spiritual beliefs, healing rituals, and political practices were indecipherable to the dominant modes of knowing (or rather, the modern episteme). In this essay, I meditate on these two prongs (undiscoverable terrain and knowledge systems) by presenting
swamps–as a conceptual apparatus and ecosystem–as an epistemological quandary. The physical site and conceptual knowledge of swamps’ contents (and the people and ‘wildlife’ that live there) present a problem for anthropological and historical discourse. The task, then, is to theorize the unintelligibility and impenetrability of swamplife, and the maroon communities’ existence within it.

Author

• Corbin Covington, Northwestern University