Wild cimarrones: Cuban maroon ecology in the first half of the 19th century and the corporeal rift

Abstract: Analyses of enslaved labor and marronage in the Caribbean and beyond abound. As insightful and important as many of these works have been, they have often overlooked the ecological dimension of the maroons’ struggle for their liberation, the relationship between nature and the political struggle for emancipation. Drawing on archival data, other primary sources, and secondary materials, and building on historical materialism and ecology, this work describes some elements of the ecological dimensions of maroons’ life in Cuba in the first half of the 19th century. This thesis pays special attention to their metabolic relationship marronage established with its natural environment. Key theoretical concepts are part of the analysis, like corporeal rift, relative wilderness, and biogeocenosis. The thesis concludes that 19th century Cuban marronage was inseparable from the preservation of relative wilderness, and that maroons established an oppositional mode of life to that of the capitalist-colonial plantation system of production.