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 in the midst of ongoing state repression. This project will investigate the debate between these two formations as an exemplary limit-case for examining the relation between evidentiary uncertainty on the one hand and ethical and political norms on the other. I situate this question’s stakes across three scales of conceptual inquiry: theories of history, of state sovereignty, and of political consciousness.