#MappingFreedom: From Freedom to Sovereignty - the International Phenomenon of Freedom Colonies. (How the Politics, Society, and Economy of ‘Post-Colonial’ Culture Shaped These Resistance Communities into “the Original Safe Spaces.”)

Darold Cuba, Harvard University

Well before the articulation of such ideas in the public square, communities that resisted Western colonialism sought to actively dismantle the settler colonial narrative, perspective, lens and worldview of the colonizer culture targeting them, through a multi-layered process of decolonization and indigenization. This process included disrupting institutional white supremacy and its systems, structures, and foundations, by using the physical acts of freedom colony creation to create the "safe spaces" and foundations to do so. By disrupting the colonial narratives of the “white gaze” (Morrison), the “white imagination” (Rankine), and the “colonized mind” (Fanon) of the “racecraft” (Fields) that created these institutional racisms and systemic white supremacies that fail the “DuVernay Test” (Dargis) in the first place, these communities were able to claim sovereignty in many, if not all, areas of human life. #MappingFreedom will share the findings from such practices and explore how GIS and historical geography methods are uncovering such practices that have been rarely explored. Because, according to Conrad and Sitton (2005): “So compelling to historians has been this dark image of the “degradation of landless blacks”—of the rise of sharecropping, “debt slavery,” the “neo-plantation,” and Jim Crow apartheid—that they often failed to notice a counter-movement. Focused as they were on the triumph of sharecropping and the accompanying “degradation of blacks” historians neglected the counter-current of black landowner settlements. No account of them had appeared in the Journal of Southern History by 2003...[T]he Southwestern Historical Quarterly still had not published a single article about black landowner communities by 2003...Reason[s] for the scholarly neglect of freedmen’s settlements may have been the decidedly counter-current (even “politically incorrect”) aspects of their story.” Over 5,000 freedom colonies have been identified in the US alone, with numerous others along every pathway of the Western colonial circuit: palenques, quilombos, maroon colonies and "‘freedmen’ settlements."

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 36. Geographies of Politics, Conflict, and Segregation