Blazing a path through critical discussions of republican theory, the writings of Frederick Douglass and Eduard Glissant, the Haitian Revolution, and Rastafari, Freedom as Marronage confronts readers with a deceivingly simple question: how does a person become “free”? Freedom, Neil Roberts answers, cannot be understood without considering the dominant term that opposes freedom in political modernity: slavery. However, instead of treating these as opposite conditions and states of being—or rather, more strictly speaking, as Roberts posits following Frantz Fanon, as a state of being opposed to a zone of nonbeing—Freedom as Marronage shows that freedom emerges in enslaved persons’ escape from and active negation of slavery.

Roberts focuses on the liminal condition between slavery and freedom: marronage. Far from being a straightforward negation of the status of enslavement, freedom is rooted in this liminal condition. Consequently, despite the infamous and widely cited consignment of slaves to what Orlando Patterson called a condition of “social death,” Roberts insists that enslaved persons do not in fact lack agency. In and by marronage, a formerly enslaved person, whether alone or together with others, asserts herself as an agent capable of altering the circumstances and political relations that condition her being. The emphasis on slave agency constitutes an important intervention in political theory at this moment, just after the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, which is still widely understood as having “freed”—juridically, from above—many (but not all) slaves in the United States. Although Roberts does not focus exclusively on the U.S., his work takes its place alongside the research of historians such as Stephen Hahn and Thaviola Glymph, who have argued that slaves’ actions as escapees, soldiers, and war refugees belonged to a chain of consequences that prompted from below President Lincoln’s Executive Order.

The book explores freedom as marronage in three parts. In the first, Roberts offers a diagnosis and theoretically sophisticated rejection of the disavowal of slave agency. It is here that he sketches the limitations of Patterson’s interpretation of slavery as “social death”: according to Roberts, Patterson ignores the psychology of the slave and thus cannot account for slaves’ “metaphysics of freedom,” and, despite his research’s global reach, he remains Eurocentric in his conception of freedom. Roberts then confronts the “disavowal” of slavery in the republicanisms of Hannah Arendt and neo-Roman theorists (especially Philip Pettit), which Roberts takes as representative of positive freedom (as non-sovereign action) and negative freedom (as non-domination) respectively. In his view, not only do Arendt and the neo-Romans disavow, that is, simultaneously acknowledge and deny, slave agency, but each is one-sided and unable to account for freedom as both positive and negative. The category of disavowal strikes me as very useful for accounting for the simultaneous absence and presence of slavery, especially racialized chattel slavery, in canonized considerations of freedom in the field of political theory.

Unlike Arendt and Pettit, slave theorists articulate understandings of freedom that bridge the divide between one-sided negative or positive accounts, and so Part II of the book reconstructs concepts of freedom as manifested in the writings and praxis of marooning slaves. Theorizing from their own experiences of slavery, thinkers like Frederick Douglass and historical actors in the Haitian Revolution have insights into, in Roberts’s words, the “dialectic of slavery and freedom” that other thinkers do not. Anyone serious about understanding freedom, then, must take the slave theorists’ expressions of marronage seriously. Their acts of marronage, moreover, are not uniform. Roberts considers them in three chapters: first, on Douglass’s individual escape from slavery, initially from the psychological fact of slavery, then from its juridical form; second, on what Roberts calls “sovereign marronage” in the large-scale slave revolt in Haiti centered on the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the features of which emerge by comparison to the “grand marronage” exhibited by escaped slaves who were able to persist in communities beyond the reach of, and intensely defended against, colonial authorities but who did not frontally challenge the structure of domination perpetuated by those authorities; third, on what Roberts calls “sociogenic marronage,” the collective forging from the bottom up of a new sociopolitical system in revolutionary Haiti.

Part III of the book offers analyses of marronage as an explicit or implicit thematic in late modernity, specifically in the cultural and political theory of Glissant and the political theology of Rastafari. Euro-Atlantic work on Glissant tends to be confined to literary and Africana studies, but Roberts shows that Glissant’s fusion of poeticist and historicist reflection is relevant to academic political theory. Roberts devotes a chapter to the interrelation between two central concepts in Glissant’s understanding of late modernity, creolization and marronage, which, for Roberts, are brought together especially in the figure of the “refugee-immigrant.” These themes are carried forward in a final reflection on Rastafari, whose political theology of exile from Zion continues a tradition of reflection on freedom and unfreedom and the flight between them.

Given the decentering of Euro-Atlantic framings of concepts and arguments in political theory in the English-speaking academy by scholars working in African-American political theory and so-called comparative political theory, as well as related fields, few will find it controversial to accept that flight from enslavement tells us something about freedom or that enslaved persons are just as much agents as the non-enslaved. For me, the controversy lies in two areas: the implications of the argument of Freedom as Marronage for flight as a generic concept, and Roberts’s theoretical orientation.

The central challenge that Freedom as Marronage poses is that Roberts focuses the entire study on the existential condition of the transition between slavery and freedom. By foregrounding flight and active movement, Roberts lends to the categories of freedom and unfreedom a multidimensionality that contradicts their habitual framing as “inherently inert conditions” (11). “During marronage,” Roberts posits, “agents struggle psychologically, socially, metaphysically, and politically to exit slavery, maintain freedom, and assert a lived social space while existing in a liminal position” (10). For Roberts, then, any agentic move to escape slavery and maintain freedom counts as marronage. Consequently, and as the category of “sovereign marronage” and the book’s designation as marronage of the building of a new post-slavery society in Haiti suggest, Roberts explicitly challenges the narrow definition of marooning in the fields of history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists have conventionally divided marronage only between petit marronage, temporary “acts of truancy” from the plantation by individuals or very small groups, and grand marronage, societies of fugitives that sustain themselves over the longer-term by making themselves inaccessible to the plantation societies. The problem for Roberts is that “[u]nder this bifurcated conception, marronage cannot address the dimensions of flight experienced and envisioned through large-scale slave revolts, revolutions, and the personalities of a polity’s political leadership” (10). For Roberts, “revolutions are themselves moments of flight” (116). Eroding the distinction between evasion and revolt, Roberts includes these other modalities of flight in an expansive continuum of marronage. He thus finds himself closer to Patterson who had, long before publishing Slavery and Social Death, asserted that even slave revolts must draw on maroon tactics, than to Eugene Genovese who, in From Rebellion to Revolution, had advanced a full-on Leninist teleology that dismissed marronage as piecemeal and narrowly local acts of spontaneity against a central, comprehensive revolution that would abolish slavery finally.

While I appreciate the desire to assimilate the multiple modalities of flight as equally agentic escapes from the nonbeing of slavery, I have two hesitations. First, gathering the multiple species of flight under the genre of marronage blunts the critical purchase of marronage. When marronage attains state form and large-scale dimension such that the Haitian Revolution counts, it seems to me that marronage’s specifically evasive quality is lost—an evasive quality that stands as a living critique not only of plantation slave regimes but also of the modern state sovereignty and large-scale political-economic formations that support them. If, from the perspective of revolt, petit and grand marronage seemed “atomistic and fleeting” or “a secluded retreat from the realities of an order in need of systemic repair” (105), then from the perspective of maroon societies, slave revolution might abolish slavery but reproduce differently oppressive juridical and capitalist orders. While I see the value in rejecting a hard distinction between the flight from and the fight against slavery, it might nonetheless be useful to recognize multiple paths between slavery and freedom that overlap but whose genealogies and effects may differ categorically.

Second, while there are moments when it seems that, despite being closer to Patterson’s insistence that flight inform fight, Roberts nonetheless succumbs to Genovese’s teleological privileging of fight against flight, macro- against meso- or micropolitical practices. Systemic repair qua revolutionary abolition seems to represent the gold standard in the chapters on sovereign and sociogenic marronage, where Roberts refers to the “abridged radicalism” of other modes of marronage (103). Certainly, Roberts does not deny the weaknesses of sociogenic and especially sovereign marronage, but bottom-up “structural reordering” (115) of the political world based on the “lived experiences” of the formerly enslaved en masse seems best to embody Roberts’s ideal. Certainly, maroon societies were impure in that they remained parasitical on the plantocratic order, but their retreat into (qua production of) the interstices of the plantation regime’s sovereignty posed as fierce a critique as did the revolutionary abolition of plantocracy—which was also impure in its acceptance of juridical order on a large scale as the means to effect radical change.

Certainly, Freedom as Marronage proves that Roberts does not write in a tentative voice but always takes his stances boldly. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that the operative vision of normative theory is prescriptive and the orientation existentialist. In the book, most of the statements of the kind “Subject is (or denotes) Predicate” function more as prescription than description: e.g., “Sociogenesis is a pluralistic sanctuary, relational, intrinsic to revolution, and a humanism” (120), which means that a project for sociogenic marronage ought to be predicated in the given ways. Roberts’s existentialist orientation, meanwhile, is evidenced by the frequent recourse to the enslaved person’s “experience” which always seems to be informed by a metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology of freedom, although how is at times unclear. Together, prescription and existentialism generate a mode of theorizing by which the theorist authorizes how a subject who aims to be free ought to act, best illustrated by the reliance on the metaphor of the “blueprint” (e.g., “Glissant’s four-stage blueprint for sociogenic marronage” [144]). But this provokes questions. How transparent is the category of “experience”? (Joan Wallach Scott argued in the classic essay “The Evidence of Experience” that it is not a neutral, transhistorical concept but is constructed.) If Freedom as Marronage retains the transhistorical normativity that Roberts claims for it, then how can those who have not personally experienced chattel slavery benefit from the blueprints that slave theorists draw? Under what kinds of assumptions about authority can one pronounce a general normative claim from the interpretation of specific experience?

Arguing prescriptively from existence and experience, and the metaphysics that connects them, may authorize a mode of normative theorizing that downplays contingency. By contrast to blueprint-type theorizing, which certifies means and ends in advance, a normative theorizing that argues tentatively but descriptively about better versus worse effects of practices oriented to a provisional strategic aim accepts nothing but contingency. Rather than drawing a blueprint, this other normative theorizing tries to come to terms with complexly intricate, mutually affecting forces on a field of battle. Unable to know the whole, which undergoes alteration not only by every change in vantage point but also by each tactical contest, this other normative theorist cannot prescribe but can only make contingent quasi-descriptive claims about the apparent effects of local modifications of forces—better or worse effects with respect to a strategic aim. How conditional are the first steps constituting freedom according to this other metaphor, and how ambivalent their apparent effects! Whether they are worth the risk cannot be assessed programmatically but must be constantly reassessed with each risk taken.