Katarzyna Kaczowka

What philosophies of history emerge when communities are made to grapple with a past that is, by historicist standards of evidence, unknowable? My project takes up this question by undertaking a comparative ethnography of competing state and social movement theories of maroon (escaped slave) history. By definition maroons fled the gaze of the colonial archive and are thus considered exemplars of intentional unknowability vis-a-vis the historicist imagination. Scientists employed by the contemporary Colombian state nevertheless cite archives documenting maroon acts of disappearance as the rationale behind constructing the notion of a distinct maroon ethnic and legal identity that has “survived” into the present. On the other hand, urban social movement participants displaced by war from these same Black peasant lands have cited these same colonial archives to theorize the impossibility of legal restitution or substantive peace in the midst of ongoing state repression. This project undertakes a contrapuntal examination of the broader marronage concept as a concept as a medium of untimely transformation on the one hand; and the state-elaborated maroon identity which acts as a self-immunizing measure to such forms of untimely transformation.