Maroonage & Collective Memory

Lasana Kazembe, Ph.D.

Collective Memory: Defining Maroon Spaces

Every successive generation of African-descended people grapples with (or should in some form or another) these and other critical cultural questions. These are organic and ongoing questions of agency, place, space, time, and ultimately, of how we construct, converse, connect, and correspond to/with ourselves. Such questions (and questioning) form an important entry point and segue for how we access, interpret, and inculcate meaning. As early as the sixteenth century, kidnapped Africans, scattered throughout the Americas and away from their ancestral homes, were forced to come to terms with and confront such questions and seek solutions in a tumultuous world of violence, confusion, and shifting uncertainty. Solutions came in varied and creative forms of resistance ranging from fighting back, arson, agitation, sabotage, and labor slowdowns/stoppages. More often, however, Africans engaged a more expedient form of resistance: running away.

Historically, these Africans are known and referred to as maroons.

Black Arts Legacy: Contemporary Reclaiming and Recasting

In a compelling sense, maroonage is expressively transcendent and can effectively be described as a form of Black Aesthetic flight. The complex (and necessary) work of reclaiming and recasting Africana cultural knowledge is the inherited legacy of and challenge for committed Africana artists and scholars whose worldview and materialist approaches are authentic (i.e., culturally grounded and conscious), worthwhile, and purposeful (i.e., invested in serving current and successive generations). Such work becomes the worthwhile task of committed culture workers (teachers, poets, artists, scholars, etc.) apprenticed in the Jeli (Griot) tradition as informed spokespersons and servants to the Africana community. Accessing and reengaging the aesthetic philosophy and cultural mission of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1976) encourages maroonage (i.e, Black Aesthetic flight) on multiple levels including language, ideology, cultural expression/response, historical immersion, apprenticeship, and the careful construction of maroon spaces (both physical and non-physical). How shall we talk flight? How shall we take flight? What shall be our means of propulsion?

For the artists and theorists of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) the ontological question comprised the living center of an ongoing and nuanced philosophical inquiry into Blackness in being and being in Blackness. That dual, articulating thrust of the BAM demanded Black artists’ ultimate rejection of non-African (especially European) artistic norms, cultural fixities, and thought forms and called on them to create more worthwhile ones based on a Black intellectual and aesthetic model. Committed Black artists (writers, musicians, spoken word artists, visual and performance artists, etc.) challenged themselves to interrogate, interpret, convey, and shape the worthwhileness of a cultural epistemology informed by dying and living; beckoning and reckoning; struggling and striving; creating and recreating in the shifting, contested expanse of the African Diaspora. Addison Gayle, Jr., Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and other Black Arts thinkers came to describe this inquiry and praxis as the Black Aesthetic.

BAM: A Living Legacy

Lasana Kazembe, Ph.D.

Nelson Stevens, Uhuru (1971)

Stimulated by the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Arts Movement (1965-1976) was a cultural movement initially influenced by writer and activist Amiri Baraka. The movement was borne out of the synthesis of creative energy, Black consciousness, and political activism among young Black artists residing in New York during mid-1960s (Thomas, 1978). While concentrated primarily in New York City, Black Arts activities were also quite popular in other American cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, and Oakland. 

By realizing and creating conscious connections between creative art, African culture, and politics, Black artists (poets, writers, sculptors, musicians, painters, performance artists, etc.) sought to articulate and assist in the physical, psychological, and spiritual liberation of Black people in America and throughout the African Diaspora. Addison Gayle, Jr. (1970, 1971, 1972), Larry Neal (1968, 1989), and Hoyt Fuller (1972) were the major philosophical voices of the Black Arts era. They argued for and subsequently developed a theoretical basis and philosophical framework referred to as The Black Aesthetic. In some sense, the need for a Black Aesthetic evolved with “mounting emphasis” based on the particular western socialization of the Black psyche, as a patterned response to institutionalized racism, and the need for change (Emanuel, 1972).

Black artists pursued what Benston (2000) calls a “speculative quest for a distinctively Black modality of cultural assertion” (p. 251). Black artists sought to situate their creative products (literature, drama, music, theater, portraiture, etc.,) as cultural assets. This new aesthetic encouraged Black artists to resist White artistic norms while simultaneously articulating and confirming the cultural uniqueness of Black identities, art forms, purposes, and impressions of social reality (Van DeBurg, 1992). Thus, Black artists representing multiple genres engaged in a structured, geographically diverse, decade-plus long revolution of ideas and recapitulation of thought-forms, theoretical considerations, and philosophical (op)positionality.