Entanglements of Survival: Antillean Geographies of Freedom, Afro-Indigeneity and Diaspora
Topics: Indigenous Peoples
, Black Geographies
, Historical Geography
Keywords: Caribbean, Lesser Antilles, Indigeneity, Slavery, Afro-Indigenous
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60
Authors:
Melanie Jean Newton, University of Toronto
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Abstract
This paper centers the 17th and 18th century ethnogeography of a sub-archipelago of islands which was known to Europeans, in the early colonial period, as the ‘Charibees’. This region of the Lesser Antilles, which stretched from St. Kitts in the northwest to Tobago in the southeast, was a frontier of conflict and contact between Europeans, indigenous Antilleans and Africans between the early 17th and late 18th centuries.
Plantation slavery was an abyss into which colonial authorities sought to cast Black and Indigenous freedom. The historical ethnogeography of this region illustrates that the common enemy of plantation slavery created a space of revolutionary relationality, a zone of possibility in which Black and Indigenous people have arguably lived ever since. The Lesser Antilles’ historical geographies of Black and Indigenous survival are neither fully separate nor completely collapsible, intertwined but not the same.
The existential threat of the 17th and 18th century “plantation abyss” required complex responses–the remaking of community bonds, cultural ties, political alliances, understandings of kinship; the creation of ‘fugitive geographies’ of freedom; armed struggle. These survival strategies brought indigenous Antilleans, Africans and their descendants into relationship with each other in transformative ways. This paper examines these revolutionary relationalities as a basis for rethinking both the Caribbean past, as well as a way to re-imagine geographies of resistance to ongoing practices of colonial violence in the present day Caribbean diaspora.
Entanglements of Survival: Antillean Geographies of Freedom, Afro-Indigeneity and Diaspora
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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