The Makings of Maroon Infrastructures
[Histories of marronage] point to the ongoing conundrum entailed in moving from confinement to freedom. The flight from captivity was not only an attempt to extricate oneself from the plantation system but a means to unsettle its hegemony, to demonstrate the viability of possible outsides. Yet, any unsettling had to be complemented by the exigencies and practicalities of resettling.
These words from AbdouMaliq Simone’s The Surround encapsulate a fundamental tension at the heart of maroon existence: the paradox between rupture and endurance, the continuous oscillation between the refusal of domination and the establishment of autonomy within or in close proximity to hostile territories.
Maroon infrastructures—encompassing counter-territories, counter-logistics, and survival programs—are living, adaptive systems designed to resist the coercive order of Empire and create the conditions for its planetary abolition. Through complex, improvisational, and relational networks, these infrastructures unsettle the techno-political machinery of control, creating zones of refuge, survival, and insurgent regeneration.
Rather than static havens, maroon infrastructures evolve as dynamic ecosystems thriving through polyrhythmic practices of care, negotiation, and mutual adaptation. These networks, shaped by the cumulative knowledge of generations resisting oppression, do not merely negate existing systems of control but continuously prototype new forms of relational autonomy. This text imagines the making of maroon infrastructures as a world-making practice characterized by four interwoven dimensions: (Administrative) Statements, (Technical) Implements, (Built) Environments, and (Dramatic) Elements. Each dimension plays a vital role in sustaining maroon life amidst conditions of domination and ecological precarity.
These dimensions, rooted in both material and symbolic practices, illustrate how maroon communities cultivate autonomy under ever-shifting pressures of repression and resource scarcity. To conceptualize these dimensions, the analogy of a communal meal serves as a useful reference point.
“William Still's ‘Journal C of Station No. 2 of the Underground Railroad’ provides extensive detail of the ways in which Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee offered aid to escaped slaves during their travels northward. His narrative offers rich documentation of families and individuals during their escape and illuminates the intricate network of people—including slaves, former slaves and free blacks—who made the Underground Railroad a success.”
(Administrative) Statements: Methods and Measures
Administrative statements provide the methods and measures necessary for organizing maroon life. These are not rigid, top-down directives; rather, they function like recipes, outlining both procedural steps (methods) and proportional requirements (measures) needed to sustain collective well-being.
For example, in the preparation of a meal, a recipe articulates the proper methods (e.g., chop, sauté, simmer) and appropriate measures (e.g., precise or flexible ingredient quantities) to enable a satisfying result. Similarly, maroon administrative statements take the form of negotiated protocols, truces, mutual aid agreements, and resource-sharing guidelines that serve as recipes to sustain cooperation without coercion.
These statements emphasize adaptability and improvisation. Citing Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons, we might say that they embody fugitive planning as a militant form of preservation, safeguarding difference and autonomy while rejecting the rigid bureaucratic policies characteristic of modern state structures. In maroon infrastructures, these statements might function as adaptable blueprints for resource allocation, seasonal planting cycles, or strategies for conflict resolution. Like recipes, they encourage those who take them up to modify and supplement them to fit local and seasonal needs, preferences, resources, and conditions—adjusting for taste, dietary restrictions, and the available ingredients, cookware, and appliances.
This improvisatory approach aligns with Pierre Clastres’ theory of “societies against the state,” where leadership is subordinated to communal needs and power is diffused to prevent its consolidation into oppressive authority. Through these flexible yet coherent frameworks, maroon communities are able to maintain autonomy and relational accountability across time and shifting conditions.
(Technical) Implements: Tools and Techniques
Implements are the material tools and techniques that enable maroon communities to meet their practical needs. These tools are essential for survival, defense, mobility, and ecological stewardship, evolving in response to fluctuating environmental and social conditions.
Continuing the meal analogy, implements include both cooking tools (e.g., pots, pans, stoves, measuring cups) and eating tools (e.g., plates, bowls, serving spoons). Techniques for handling these implements—such as sautéing or portioning—illustrate the intimate connection between material resources and embodied practices.
In maroon contexts, implements encompass navigation tools, self-defense weapons, and ecological knowledge systems essential for foraging, farming, and concealment. Harriet Tubman’s renowned success on the Underground Railroad, for instance, was rooted in techniquesl for reading environmental cues—river crossings, forest paths, and celestial navigation. Similarly, maroon communities across the Americas developed specialized tools and practices, including dugout canoes in coastal Georgia, tree hollows for concealment, and coded signals, all of which supported life on the margins of colonial control.
(Built) Environments: Places and Pathways
Built environments refer to the physical and spatial infrastructures that support maroon autonomy by providing refuge, mobility, and sites for communal assembly. These environments decentralize power by fostering interconnected networks of relational spaces designed to evade surveillance and maintain self-governance.
Consider the various spaces associated with a meal: the kitchen where food is prepared, the dining area where it is consumed, and the pathways connecting these spaces. In maroon life, built environments perform analogous functions. Hidden paths, fortified settlements, and communal gathering grounds form a dispersed yet cohesive network of relational autonomy.
Examples include the intricate networks of quilombos in Brazil, which utilized dense forests and rugged landscapes to create impenetrable sanctuaries. These environments served as both physical refuges and experimental arenas for alternative social organization, enabling maroon communities to rehearse ways of living beyond the constraints of colonial law. Simone’s concept of the surround captures this spatial strategy, emphasizing environments that remain “slightly out of joint”—visible yet elusive, fostering both rest and regeneration.
(Dramatic) Elements: Actors and Factors
Dramatic elements encompass the actors and situational factors that shape the unfolding dynamics of maroon life. These include both the individuals who assume various leadership roles—organizers, caretakers, defenders, cherished animal, vegetal and mineral allies—and the contextual forces influencing their actions.
In the context of a meal, the dramatis personae include cooks, servers, diners, and bussers, while dramatic circumstances might involve seasonal changes, economic instability, or the emotional states of those involved, all of which can affect the meal’s ingredients, cost, ease of preparation, and the enjoyment of those who partake. Similarly, in maroon infrastructures, actors navigate shifting conditions through relational accountability, employing skill and trust to maintain communal stability. Their roles are shaped by the interplay between internal needs and external pressures, such as state repression, ecological challenges, and social conflict. These actors embody the resilience and adaptability that are essential to maroon praxis.
Maroon Infrastructures in Practice
Maroon infrastructures, both historical and contemporary, exemplify the resilience and adaptability of strategies that challenge Empire’s control over space, bodies, and resources. These infrastructures do not merely react to oppressive systems but actively prefigure new, relational ways of organizing life, care, and resistance. Across the Black Atlantic, the experiences of fugitivity—from the establishment of territorial sanctuaries to complex logistical networks—demonstrate how the flight from captivity laid the foundations for autonomous worlds structured by mutual care and accountability.
Counter-Territories
Quilombos and Maroon Settlements
Quilombos, such as the legendary Palmares in Brazil, are quintessential examples of maroon counter-territories. These communities harnessed the landscape’s natural defenses—dense forests, rugged hills, and remote swampy regions—not merely as barriers against colonial incursions but as environments conducive to reimagining social and political life . The Great Dismal Swamp in the southeastern United States similarly sheltered maroon settlements, using its vast and difficult terrain to protect communities from capture . In both contexts, the terrain became a medium through which fugitives could evade surveillance and fortify their autonomy.
As Clóvis Moura emphasizes, quilombos were not merely refuges but centers of ongoing political and social resistance. By destabilizing plantation economies and ideologies of racial domination, these settlements enacted what Moura calls a “radical negation” of slavery’s foundational logics . Their refusal to subordinate themselves to colonial authority required military campaigns to uproot, underscoring their existential threat to the plantation system.
Moreover, maroon communities often employed diplomacy to sustain their autonomy. Negotiated truces with colonial authorities or neighboring Indigenous groups were tactical maneuvers, not concessions. These agreements enabled maroons to maintain their networks of care, mobility, and defense while minimizing direct confrontation . In this way, maroon counter-territories balanced concealment with visibility, retreat with strategic negotiation.
Counter-Logistics
The Underground Railroad and Black Star Line
Mobility and secrecy are essential components of maroon resistance, forming the basis of counter-logistical infrastructures that outmaneuver the surveillance and control mechanisms of the state. The Underground Railroad exemplified such an infrastructure, with a vast network of secret routes, safe houses, and alliances across abolitionist communities . Fugitives and conductors relied on human and environmental resources to facilitate escape, from coded communication systems to deep ecological knowledge. Harriet Tubman’s mastery of these logistical elements—including celestial navigation and knowledge of river crossings—enabled her to guide dozens of fugitives to safety.
The Underground Railroad’s success relied on the interplay of administrative statements (e.g., maps), technical implements (e.g., hidden compartments in carriages), built environments (e.g., river crossings, land routes, iron forges, foundries, waterways, and other natural or human-made hiding places), and dramatic elements (e.g., fluctuating weather conditions, shifting patrol patterns). These networks continually adapted to external pressures, demonstrating the flexibility essential for sustaining maroon mobility.
Similarly, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line sought to disrupt colonial control over global trade and transportation by creating an independent shipping network for African-descended people . Though eventually sabotaged by state interference and internal divisions, the Black Star Line represented a broader diasporic vision of autonomy. By attempting to reclaim maritime infrastructure, it challenged the racialized economic systems that had long governed the movement of goods and people across oceans.
Both the Underground Railroad and the Black Star Line illustrate how counter-logistics function as a crucial dimension of maroon praxis, ensuring that fugitivity remains a viable strategy under conditions of state repression. Through adaptive logistical infrastructures, maroon communities navigate and undermine dominant networks of power.
Survival Programs
The Black Panther Party and Community Care
Survival programs extend maroon infrastructures into the realm of community care and social reproduction. The Black Panther Party’s initiatives—ranging from free breakfast programs for children to community health clinics and copwatching patrols—challenged the state’s monopolization of welfare and security. These programs aimed to provide both material and emotional resources, ensuring that Black communities could survive and thrive despite systemic neglect .
Administrative statements played a central role in formalizing these efforts. Protocols for resource allocation, volunteer coordination, and food distribution exemplified the meticulous planning necessary to sustain such programs. For example, the Party’s breakfast programs involved carefully designed measures to procure, prepare, and serve meals to large numbers of children, ensuring both nutritional adequacy and communal participation .
Technical implements such as supply chains, kitchen equipment, and medical tools supported the programs’ practical functions, while dramatic elements—including the Party’s visible presence through uniforms and public patrols—served to deter violence and mobilize solidarity. However, as Simone’s The Surround highlights, this visibility also heightened vulnerability to counterinsurgency, illustrating the precarious balance between public assertion and concealment .
Complementary Practices
Clandestine Noncompliance and Belonging to the Surround
Complementary practices such as clandestine noncompliance and relational belonging are essential to maroon infrastructures. Clandestine noncompliance involves tactics of misdirection, invisibility, and tactical deception designed to subvert surveillance and capture . Afro-Brazilian Capoeira’s concept of malícia—a form of embodied tactical agility—provides a striking example of how physical movement can serve as both a survival strategy and a mode of defiance .
In contrast, belonging to the surround emphasizes the cultivation of mutual care and adaptive trust. This relational practice operates through what Simone describes as “intensive contiguity,” where peripheral spaces and networks become central to survival and resistance . Marginal environments—abandoned buildings, urban underpasses, and secluded pathways—offer maroon communities opportunities to rehearse new forms of relational autonomy without falling prey to the full capture of state power.
The Surround as Infrastructural Effect
The surround, as conceptualized by Simone, encapsulates the dynamic process through which maroon infrastructures unsettle and reconfigure dominant systems of control. These infrastructural effects manifest in spaces and practices that operate “slightly out of joint,” creating zones where insurgent futures can be rehearsed. Through cycles of disruption, evasion, and care, maroon infrastructures transform survival into a generative praxis of liberation, resisting co-optation by state and capitalist systems.
By integrating counter-territories, counter-logistics, and survival programs, and by embracing the ineffability of clandestine noncompliance and the opacity of the surround, maroon infrastructures reveal the transformative power of relational autonomy. They challenge Empire’s foundational logics, creating possibilities for alternative worlds where survival itself becomes an act of radical freedom and resistance.
