TY  - JOUR
A1  - Waller, Nicole
T1  - Marronage or underground?
T2  - MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
N2  - I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57796
SN  - 0163-755X
SN  - 1946-3170
VL  - 47
IS  - 1
SP  - 45
EP  - 70
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -