Writing maroon culture into nature: on the agency of colonial representations of black and green in Suriname
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
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Kemper, Rudo
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology
- Abstract
- In this master's thesis, I analyze travel writing about Suriname, from early European colonization until the mid-20th century, to understand how the country's maroon populations were gradually imagined as belonging to the landscape of the rainforest interior. I argue that Suriname travelogues and similar narratives across this time period index and reproduce a colonial gaze of maroons as a natural (and therefore non-historical) component of the rainforest ontology. I trace these representations through the historical contexts and networks in which these travelogues circulate, drawing attention to sedimented narrative tropes about the rainforest and maroons which persevere throughout. Additionally, I argue that representations of maroons-in-nature play important roles as actants in present-day assemblages and networks. My goal in doing so is to demonstrate that post-structural methodologies such as genealogy or discourse analysis can be useful in a `flat ontologies' political ecology framework, despite philosophical differences between the two movements of thought.
- Date of publication
- May 2014
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Slocum, Karla
- Degree
- Master of Arts
- Graduation year
- 2014
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