Oathbound: Gender, Sovereignty, and "Marronage" in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

NEW DIRECTIONS IN STUDIES OF WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

SPEAKER: Bradley L. Craig, Concordia University 

Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the political history of gender and sovereignty in the Atlantic world. These Maroons engaged in a radical worldmaking project rooted in an Atlantic political culture of oath-making that allowed them to recast their political subjectivity across different colonial spaces. By binding themselves to a radical vision of fragmented sovereignty and a sense of diasporic community, they revealed the deep significance of Maroon women’s cultivation of sovereignty through stewardship of the land and Maroon men’s cultivation of political attachment through masculine claims of kinship.

Bradley L. Craig is an assistant professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where he teaches courses on Black Atlantic history. After receiving his PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University in 2020, he was a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (2020-2021).  He is working on his first book manuscript, currently titled Oathbound: The Trelawny Maroons of Jamaica in the Revolutionary Atlantic World.

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