*Book launch: Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: 
Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica
by Jean Besson*
Wednesday, 12 October 2016 17:30

UCL-Institute of the Americas, Lecture Room 103, 51 Gordon Square WC1H 
0PN London
Free to attend, but please register 
"https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/transformations-of-freedom-in-the-land-of-the-maroons-creolization-in-the-cockpits-jamaica-registration-27546703933"

Despite outstanding histories and ethnographies on maroons (escaped 
slaves and their descendants), there has been little attempt to compare 
the cultures of modern maroons with the cultures of the descendants of 
emancipated slaves who are the majority of African-Americans today. 
There is therefore a gap in the comparative exploration of creolization 
(‘indigenization’ in Europe’s ‘New World’) in maroon and non-maroon 
derivations of African-American slave cultures.

This book fills that gap through a comparative ethnography of three 
post-slavery communities – Accompong, Aberdeen and Maroon Town – that 
stand fast in the Jamaican Cockpit Country, at the heart of 
African-America’s Caribbean core. Accompong is the oldest corporate 
maroon society in the Americas enduring on common treaty land. Aberdeen 
is a free village descended mainly from emancipated slaves, who created 
and transmitted family lands. Maroon Town, with its range of tenures, is 
a community claiming descent from colonists, slaves and maroons.

Consolidating over 30 years of research in these villages, the book 
provides a sweeping yet all-encompassing examination of comparative 
creolization (especially through rooting identities, kin groups and 
communities in Caribbean land) and the complexities of ethnicity at the 
maroon/non-maroon interface.

Discussant: David Lowenthal, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University 
College London.

*Jean Besson* is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, 
University of London. She has carried out research in Jamaica and the 
Eastern Caribbean, publishing on cultural history, land, law, 
development, kinship, gender, narratives, religion, migration and ethnicity.