Pedro Lebrón Ortiz

Filosofía del cimarronaje proposes a phenomenology of marronage in order to explore how marronage can be used as a framework to understand contemporary sociopolitical movements. More fundamentally still, Filosofía del cimarronaje seeks to explore how marronage can be understood as a particular way of being in the world of racial capitalism and anti-Blackness. The text begins by providing the reader a broad history of slavery and colonization in the Americas, the production of whiteness as a political category in those processes to safeguard the consolidation of racial capitalism, and the ubiquity and diversity of marronage across the hemisphere. Crucially, it emphasizes that flight from the plantation also constituted flight from the underlying logics which manifest on the plantation. The text then transitions to explore the ways in which logics of slavery and colonization persist today and argues that if slavery and marronage are inextricable, then logics of marronage must persist today as well. This book argues that a maroon subjectivity is constituted by a tension which involves the affirmation of one’s existence beyond the confines of Western humanism and a confrontation which seeks to fracture those logics of the plantation, which then manifest on multiple registers. The book then applies this framework to contemporary sociopolitical occurrences in Puerto Rico, specifically the summer of 2019 and instances of autogestión, in an attempt to shed new light on how these events and practices are viewed. Filosofía del cimarronaje contributes to the growing literature of marronage, while also contributing to the canon of contemporary Caribbean and Puerto Rican philosophical thought. With a foreword by Anayra Santory Jorge and an afterword by Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

In this article, I seek to explore Hip Hop as an expression of marronage. I identify marronage as an existential mode of being which restitutes human temporality. Slavery and flight from slavery constituted two inextricable historical processes, therefore logics of marronage must also constitute contemporary human experience. I argue that Hip Hop offers a distinct way of affirming and expressing one’s existence through what has been called a “maroon consciousness.” In the same way that maroons created new worlds free from the tyranny of slavery, Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics.

This article seeks to explore the temporal experience of decolonization/decoloniality through Furio Jesi's phenomenology of revolt, using the Puerto Rico summer protests of 2019 as a case study, to suggest that decolonization inhibits the functionality of the mythological machine because in the context of coloniality, revolt is the product of a biological exigency. In addition, I argue that decolonization should not be understood as an inevitable end point, or end goal, known a priori, but rather it is an anti-teleological process and subjectivity that at once fuses the time of revolt and revolution; an impossible task in Jesi's framework.

This text intends on putting what may be called a philosophy of marronage1 in conversation with Indigenous thought, particularly by engaging with the thought of Cherokee Nation philosopher Brian Burkhart from his essay “Locality is a Metaphysical Fact.”2 While the topic is treated in detail in Burkhart’s Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land (2019), my engagement with that specific text will be reserved for a separate project. What is of interest to me here is Burkhart’s elaboration of the concept of locality, which refers to an “ontological kinship with the land” that serves as a bulwark against the sedimentation of the coloniality of being in the ontology of the Indigenous subject. I would like to add some nuance to it from the positionality of a subject whose ontological kinship with the land was severed through the kidnapping and enslavement of the ancestors from the African continent. In the process, my intent is to offer an alternate reading of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) which may allow Fanonian thought to be reconciled with North Native American Indigenous thought, which has typically rejected Fanon’s rejection of a return to ancestral ways. This alternate reading of Fanon shows that a reconnection with ancestral ways, and reconstruction of locality, constitutes only part of the liberation project for Afro-diasporic subjects.

En este artículo elaboro una concepción filosófica del cimarronaje para ponerlo en conversación, a grosso modo, con el pensamiento decolonial. Esto consiste en la discusión del concepto cimarronería sociogénica, que se define como la huida de las fuerzas opresoras de la modernidad europea a través de una praxis política decolonial, y la cimarronería analéctica, que defino como la huida de la modernidad europea misma. Planteo que la relación entre estos dos fenómenos constituye lo que he llamado la doble crítica cimarrona y que su manifestación concreta, en distintas configuraciones, constituye lo que he denominado lógicas cimarronas. Sostengo que la cimarronería analéctica tiene un elemento pedagógico que tiene el potencial de iniciar un giro decolonial. Finalmente, miro de manera resumida los sucesos del verano puertorriqueño de 2019 a través de este marco teórico, que he denominado filosofía del cimarronaje, para identificar rasgos de cimarronaje, en el sentido ontológico que abordo, en la sociedad puertorriqueña contemporánea y algunos paralelos con la Revolución Haitiana.

A critical study of marronage is urgent since certain anthropological and historical analyses have painted an image of slavery—and therefore of marronage as well—as something of the past. This text will demonstrate that marronage, rather than being simply flight from the plantation in a literal sense, also refers to flight from oppressive institutions through permanent institutional reconfiguration as well as to an existential state of Being. In this text I sketch out ways in which marronage is made manifest within and outside Euromodernity, which I call maroon logics. Maroon logics consists of two interdependent modes of embodying freedom and struggling for liberation. On the one hand there is sociogenic marronage, elaborated by political theorist Neil Roberts in his book Freedom as Marronage (2015), which refers to permanent institutional change as a manifestation of marronage. On the other hand, there is what I call analectical marronage, which denotes resistance to the coloniality of being.

The colonial process constituted a twofold catastrophe. On the one hand, the genocide and enslavement of racialized bodies, along with the large-scale destruction of their lands was a material, or physical, catastrophe. On the other hand, colonialism led to a reconfiguring of intersubjectivities which constituted a “metaphysical catastrophe” according Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres. This metaphysical catastrophe relegates the racialized subject beneath the zones of being and non-being leading to dehumanization and permanent war. This text intends to illuminate ways in which analectical marronage, as an existential state of Being, resists this twofold catastrophe brought about by the imperial enterprise.