Jean Besson

Despite outstanding histories and ethnographies on maroons, there has been little attempt to draw modern maroons into a comparative perspective with the descendants of emancipated slaves who are the majority of African-Americans today. There is therefore a gap in the comparative exploration of creolization in maroon and non-maroon derivations of African-American slave cultures. Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons bridges that gap through a comparative ethnography of three post-slavery transnational communities - Accompong, Aberdeen and Maroon Town - that stand fast in the Jamaican Cockpit Country today. The Cockpit Country, so named after the cock-fighting pits introduced by the Spanish to the Americas, with steep mountains and deep valleys, straddles the interior of adjoining parishes in central Jamaica. During slavery these Cockpits served as a refuge for fighting maroons and the provision grounds of plantation slaves. In the twenty-first century Accompong endures as a corporate maroon society; Aberdeen is a village descended from emancipated slaves; and Maroon Town is a community claiming descent from planters, maroons and slaves. Consolidating over 30 years of research and fieldwork in these communities, Jean Besson provides a sweeping yet all-encompassing examination of comparative creolization and the complexities of ethnicity at the maroon/non-maroon interface.

Contemporary Caribbean society emerged within a complex framework of extensive and exploitive interconnections on a global scale, and unequal, inter-cultural, social relations at the local level. This book explores the communities of belonging that Caribbean people have created ands sustained, as they have carved out a life for themselves within this context of social, economic and cultural complexity. Caribbean narratives offer a fertile ground in which to explore notions and practices of belonging, because they are rich in empirical data on the lives experienced by various Caribbean people. At the same time they point to the shared socio-cultural orders that give meaning and purpose to these lives. By analyzing narratives as accounts of lived lives, as a way of structuring the past, and as modes of communication and performance, the chapters in this volume develop important insights into Caribbean culture and bring fresh perspectives to cross-cultural research on narratives and their articulation with fields of social relations and sites of cultural identity. The sixteen chapters by anthropologists, geographers, historians and sociologists are based on in-depth research from throughout the Caribbean region and among Caribbean migrants and their descendents in Europe and North America.