Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons

While numerous anthropological and historical works have been written on the Maroons, there is a dearth of comparative treatises considering the binary of creolization and ethnic identity formation among modern Maroons and their freed-slave descendant counterparts in the Americas.Veteran Caribbeanist Jean Besson-who has carried out extensive fieldwork in the region-expertly fills this gap here by concentrating on three "transnational" communities in Jamaica's Cockpit Country-Accompong, Aberdeen, and Maroon Town.(Maroon Town has also been known as-or associated with-Trelawny Town, Cudjoe/Kojo Town, Petty River Bottom, and Flagstaff, at different historical periods.)Her book is an interdisciplinary work of historical ethnography that weaves together oral history interviews with members of the three communities, anthropological fieldwork/participant observation of the ways in which the members of the community remember and commemorate their history, and written records.The Cockpit Country is central to Besson's study given that the "similarities and differences in creolization that evolved in Accompong, Aberdeen, and Maroon Town, rooted in maroon and non-maroon transformations of African-American [more accurately Afro-Jamaican] slave cultures, were forged in this Cockpit Country landscape" (p.14).This rugged interior was also the site of violent antislavery upheavals that contributed to the demise of slavery on the island and the consequent establishment of peasant villages, as well as emigration to urban centers and abroad.Thus, the Cockpit Country "has been shaped by a long history of violent resistance as well as peaceful coexistence, continuity as well as change, mobility as well as rootedness" (p.xvii).Besson first traces and analyzes the causes and consequences of the Maroon Wars.She then examines how those wars are remembered in oral history narratives and cultural practices within the three communities with disparate postwar and postemancipation historical trajectories.She explains that the Accompong Maroon stronghold was officially recognized by the British immediately after the First Jamaican Maroon War with the former (1725-38/39), when the British Governor of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny, and the Afro-Creole Maroon Captain Cudjoe signed a peace treaty in the Cockpits.The treaty "granted" the Leeward Maroons both freedom and legal rights to 1,500 acres of land in Trelawny Town, which later increased to 2,559 acres to include Accompong('s) Town.However, after the Second Maroon War (1795-96), the colonists betrayed the Maroons of Trelawny Town, deporting them to Nova Scotia, and confiscat

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