The Limitations and Possibilities of Freedom as Flight: Engaging Neil Roberts’s Freedom as Marronage

• Published in: Theory & event 2017, Vol.20 (1), p.182-187
• Main Author: Gordon, Jane Anna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Caribbean literature; Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961); Wynter, Sylvia
• ISSN: 2572-6633; 1092-311X

[...]Roberts states that existentialists do not assume, as he advocates, that we are born into a condition of slavery.4 At the same time, when engaging Édouard Glissant, Roberts highlights the existential dimensions of his work; namely, his distinction between being and becoming as well as Patterson's use of Albert Camus's use of the myth of Sisyphus.5 Put simply, given the desire to consider the fundamental and permanent relationship between freedom and unfreedom more richly, wouldn't an existential starting point of human beings as both free and constrained, capable of transcendence and irredeemably factical, be precisely what Roberts wants and needs? [...]many commentators, among them Vincent Brown, have criticized Orlando Patterson for supposedly arguing that slaves were socially dead, pointing to the evidence of the social worlds of enslaved people and many instances of their creative resistance as the clear contradiction to Patterson's central claim.6 However, as I read him, Patterson was not arguing that slaves were socially dead but instead that they were treated and expected to behave as if they were socially dead. [...]if Douglass was able to seek a version of manhood that was neither patriarchal nor misogynist, would that not fundamentally belie the conventional gender roles of his day? [...]the exile, immigrant, and refugee are not understood as stealing themselves from another who rightfully possesses them.