Examining Freedom

The concept of freedom has been on Neil Roberts’ mind for much of his academic career. Is it a state of being or an idea? Are humans born enslaved? How can we talk about freedom without talking about its opposite? And what, truly, is its opposite?

In Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Roberts uses the experience of marooned communities, particularly groups of slaves who fled plantations in the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries, to examine the idea of freedom and “to really shatter the conventional ways of how freedom is taught.”

The associate professor of Africana studies says Western political theory presents the idea of freedom as “fixed”—you’re free or you’re not. But “there’s something about our lived experience I really want to underscore.”

Marronage, which traditionally refers to groups of slaves in various states of escape and survival, helps underscore it. The idea of flight—in this case, escaping “unfreedom” to exist in a community of other runaways—pushes against the notion that freedom is a finite state. “Flight for me is not simply physical,” Roberts says. “It’s cognitive, and it’s structural.”

Drawing on a wide variety of scholarly work (“Hannah Arendt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge don’t usually get put in a book with the Haitian Revolution,” he says), Roberts also covers cases where groups of people try to overturn the status quo. These cases frame freedom not as the physical act of escaping, but as a political movement. They ask the reader to consider the strengths and weaknesses of those who see their freedom through a vision for a new society or through the establishment of a new leader.

Roberts has been at Williams since 2008 and also teaches courses in political theory. He’s written extensively about the way Caribbean, Continental and North American theories address the idea of freedom. He is co-editor of Creolizing Rousseau (2014) and editor of the series Creolizing the Canon, all published by Rowman & Littlefield. Freedom as Marronage is his first single-authored book.

Excerpt

Marronage is a flight from the negative, subhuman realm of necessity, bondage and unfreedom toward the sphere of positive activity and human freedom. Flight is multidimensional, constant and never static. Negative and positive theorists overwhelmingly conceive of freedom as a stable condition. Negative formulations articulate stability as security against interference and domination. Positive ideals endorse a vision of freedom that agents can imagine arriving at, and they classify agents either as participators in the active life or as unfree. There is no consideration of the transitional space between unfreedom and freedom. Agency exists prior to and during a slave’s dialectical encounter with the stages of liberation and freedom. Agency is temporally fluid because of the political imaginary underlying it in the minds of the slave and the free. Modern Western theories of freedom obscure the degrees of agency and their relation to freedom due to their inattentiveness to the act of flight.

The concept of marronage is not anti-Western, but post-Western. Post- designates neither a comprehensive jettisoning of the past nor the bracketing of a particular intellectual tradition in favor of another. … Western thought alone cannot explain flight emerging from the interstitial. … By looking at the idea of marronage and then rethinking conceptualizations of freedom in Western theory through the marronage heuristic, we are able to use marronage as a tool applicable respectively to Western and non-Western thinkers and movements. Work critically integrating lived experience, slavery and slave agency highlights the stakes of uniting the negative and positive streams of thought on freedom.
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