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Dr. Alex A. Moulton��
Assistant Professor��
Geography and Environmental Science��
Hunter College, CUNY��
Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies��

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Within Afro-Jamaica religions, “science” is used as descriptor for traditional medicinal knowledge, ritual practices, and spirituality. Practitioners of Obeah, Myal, and other Afrocentric spiritual traditions, often identify themselves as “scientists”. We can read this as a challenge to the negation and denigration of Marron practices as evil or satanic. Through the analytical framework of Black Ecologies, this paper leans into a reading of the maroon claim to science not so much an appeal for Western science or the translation of Maroon practices into Western scientific rationality, but an assertion of a counter-science, an alternative Black science that is not less valid than Western science. Centering the famed Grande Nanny, chieftainess of the Windward Maroons, I consider how the mythic stories of marronage and maroon obeah disclose a Black ecological science concerned with the advancement of Black communal flourish. While Nanny is denounced by colonial historians as a practitioner of witchcraft, and unmoored from reality, I argue for attention to the concrete Black ecologies, messiness of social reproduction, and gendered geographies of mobility that placemaking evince. Taking seriously the British fears of the maroons, narrated as a ghostly foe haunting the project of conquest, the paper considers the present imperative of marronage in struggles for socioecological justice and agrarian sovereignty.

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