Penser le marronnage :

Organized by Sciences Po, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, and Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

The term marronage refers to the struggles of the enslaved and fugitives in the Atlantic World. Despite regional differences between the marrons of the Francophone Antilles and the maroons of the Jamaican highlands, between the Colombian palenques and the quilombos of Brazil, marronage denotes a shared experience and a set of collective memories. Beyond an object of historical or anthropological study, marronage is a living political tradition. This “hidden tradition” has for long received the attention of political thinkers who have turned to it as a source of inspiration to rethink freedom and emancipation outside the register of a Eurocentric universalist discourse. This conference hopes to construct a dialogue across the disciplines to reconsider marronage as a contribution to political thought in the present. The tradition of marronage allows to recenter theoretical reflection on practices relegated to the margins of modernity: the numerous cases of fugitive individuals (petit marronage) but also those of entire communities (grand marronage) – on forms of marronage that escape the binary distinction between flight and the foundation of order as they institute a revolutionary order for a life held in common: the institution of counter-community.

Organizers: Hourya Bentouhami, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Kaiama L. Glover, Professor of French and Africana Studies, Barnard College/Columbia University and 2018-2019 Fellow at the Institute

Niklas Plaetzer, Doctoral student in political theory, Sciences Po Paris / University of Chicago

Co-sponsored by the Centre International de Recherche sur les Esclavages (CIRESC), the Institut Universitaire de France, and the Columbia Alliance Program.

The event is bilingual (English and French).

You can view the program for the event here.