Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity

 

Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity 

• On Ontological Refusal and Epistemic Disobedience 

Introduction: The Global Prison 

    What does it mean to be a fugitive? To most the word conjures up the image of someone who has committed a crime and has fled the scene for fear of punishment. But what does Fugitivity mean in the sociological and political sense? In this context, it means that one refuses to be governed, controlled, or contained by oppressive systems. It is a state of existence, rather than an act, whereby marginalized peoples create, sustain, and defend their individual and collective humanities in spaces that exist outside or on the edges of the dominant political structure. This is the concept of Fugitivity I would like to explore. How do we “escape” or transform a global society that grounds its foundations in a modernity built upon systemic violence and extractive exploitation? What alternatives are there and how can we build them in the face of a system that, as part of its maintenance for its own existence, exterminates and extricates all radical, decolonial alternatives? The power of fugitivity as a framework for resistance is evident given this conundrum between the urgent need for social, political, and economic change and the seemingly inhospitable environment for the gestation of such change. 

    The most prescient historical example for Fugitivity not just as a metaphysical project, but as a literal reclamation of colonized spaces against the very extractive and exploitative process that birthed them in the first place, are the Caribbean and Brazilian maroon Societies that formed inside the heart of the capitalist plantation core. 

Illusion of a Horizon: Modernity as Enclosure

    To map the architecture of the fugitive, one must first map the prison house of the global present. As Enrique Dussel brilliantly illuminates in The Invention of the Americas, the dawn of modernity was not an awakening of universal reason, but an act of violent, foundational concealment. The year 1492 marks the birth of a world-system that requires a sacrificial myth: the myth that Western civilization is inherently superior, rational, and destined to civilize the earth. Beneath this myth lies what Aníbal Quijano terms the coloniality of power: a persistent, structural hierarchy that classifies humanity by race, extracts wealth from the labor of the racialized, and codifies this theft as global progress.

    This modernity is fundamentally extractive. It views the earth, the forest, and the human body not as kin, but as resources to be mined, quantified, and exhausted. David Stannard’s devastating historical accounts in American Holocaust and Before the Horror remind us that this system does not tolerate alternative ways of being. It maintains its hegemony through epistemic and physical eradication, erasing the indigenous, the communal, and the sacred to make way for the plantation and the ledger. The global capitalist core operates as a totalizing enclosure. It presents itself as the only viable reality, declaring, in the words of its modern neoliberal architects, that “there is no alternative.” How, then, does one resist a system that swallows the very ground upon which resistance stands?

Fugitive Epistemology: Refusal and Locus of Enunciation

    It is precisely within this inhospitable enclosure that the concept of fugitivity transforms from a desperate act of flight into a radical philosophical orientation. To understand fugitivity in its deep sociological and political sense, we must perform what Walter Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience. We must shift our locus of enunciation away from the center of colonial governance, the university, the statehouse, the courthouse… and sit instead in the clearing, the swamp, the mountain ridge, and the valley.

    From the viewpoint of the state, the fugitive is a criminal, a lack, a broken piece of machinery that has run away. But from the viewpoint of the clearing, the fugitive is the only truly sane subject. Fugitivity is the conscious, sustained refusal to be governed, categorized, or contained by a system grounded in systemic violence. It is an ontological pivot: a shift from asking the master for freedom to embodying freedom on one’s own terms. It realizes that you cannot dismantle the plantation by appealing to the planter’s morality; you must leave the plantation boundaries entirely and construct an alternative world in its shadows.

The Metaphysics of the Maroon: Interdependence vs. Separation

    This act of world-building requires an entirely different metaphysics than the atomized, individualist philosophy of Western capitalism. Here, the radical insights of Eastern and Indigenous philosophies become our map. Capitalist modernity relies on a philosophy of radical separation, the delusion that the human being exists apart from nature, and that the individual can thrive at the expense of the collective.

    To shatter this illusion, we turn to the second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna and his profound exposition of Śūnyatā (emptiness) and Pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination). Nagarjuna posits that no entity, institution, or identity possesses an inherent, independent self-existence (svabhava). Everything exists in a state of radical, unbroken interdependence; a thing is only what it is by virtue of its relation to everything else.

    When applied to political philosophy, Nagarjuna’s interdependence reveals that the totalizing power of the colonial state is itself an illusion, a terrifying ghost that relies on our compliance to exist. The plantation cannot function without the enslaved; the empire cannot expand without the compliance of the colonized. By withdrawing our energy, our labor, and our epistemic compliance from the state, we expose its emptiness.

    Furthermore, this relational ontology informs the very nature of fugitive survival. As Anna Tsing observes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, life persists in capitalist ruins not through purity or isolation, but through collaborative, unpredictable, and multispecies assemblages. Like the matsutake mushroom growing in degraded landscapes, fugitive communities survive by forming symbiotic relationships with the land, the forgotten spaces, and each other. This is echoed in the Indigenous Insights for Sustainable Food Systems, where food sovereignty is understood not as an industrial calculation, but as a sacred relationship of reciprocity with the land, an enactment of Aloha ʻĀina that sustains the community outside the capitalist supply chain.

Historical Reality: Maroon Sovereignty 

    This philosophy was given flesh, blood, and military might in the Maroon societies of the Caribbean and Brazil. When African people broke their chains and fled into the mountainous interiors of Jamaica or the dense forests of Alagoas in Brazil, they were not merely escaping work; they were enacting an alternative modernity.

    In Brazil, the Quilombo dos Palmares stood for nearly a century as a thriving, multi-ethnic, non-capitalist republic in the heart of the Portuguese empire. Palmares was a literal manifestation of Nagarjuna’s interdependence and Tsing’s assemblages; it brought together diverse African ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, and marginalized whites into a cooperative agricultural society. They rejected the monocultural extraction of sugarcane, practicing instead diversified, sustainable subsistence farming that fed their collective humanity.

    Similarly, the Maroons of Jamaica utilized the treacherous topography of the Cockpit Country to wage asymmetric warfare against the British Empire. They turned the geography of colonial extraction upside down, using the dense jungle as a shield and a teacher. Maroon fugitivity was an exercise in radical adaptability. They developed sophisticated systems of long-distance communication through the abeng (cow horn), practiced guerrilla tactics that baffled imperial armies, and maintained an unyielding devotion to ancestral autonomy. They forced the British Empire to sign treaties recognizing their independence, a stunning historical proof that even within the absolute core of the capitalist plantation economy, autonomous, decolonial spaces could be gestated, defended, and sustained.

The New Pluriversal Horizon: From the Pacific to Palestine

    The Maroon clearing is not a relic of the past; it is a living template for modern global resistance. We see this same spirit of fugitivity in Noenoe Silva’s Aloha Betrayed, which uncovers the rich, textually vibrant history of Native Hawaiian resistance to American annexation. The Hawaiian people did not passively accept the theft of their kingdom; they utilized Hawaiian-language newspapers, massive petition drives, and a cultural devotion to Aloha ʻĀina to maintain an intellectual and spiritual sovereignty that the American empire could never fully capture. This is fugitivity as cultural and linguistic preservation, creating a space within the language where the empire cannot enter.

    Today, this global network of the clearing stretches from the valleys of Hawaii to the mountains of Chiapas, the autonomous cantons of Rojava, and the indomitable resistance of communities in Palestine, Lebanon, and across the Global South. These movements operate under the same socialist and radical lineages passed down from Marx to Ho Chi Minh, from Lenin to Amílcar Cabral. They understand that while the face of the empire changes, from the wooden ships of the Portuguese to the digital surveillance drones of modern militarism; the fundamental task remains the same.

    To practice modern fugitivity is to build the world we want while living inside the world we reject. It is the community garden in the blighted urban center; the encrypted digital network bypassing state eyes; the indigenous blockading of a pipeline to protect water; the collective study group unlearning imperial history. We are all tasked with becoming maroons of the mind and of the soil. We must find our clearings, cultivate our interdependencies, and remember that no matter how totalizing the system appears, it is built on stolen, bloodied ground, and the cracks in its foundations are where our mushrooms of resistance grow.