Feminist Marronage: Fieldnotes on Abscondence

How can the verb abscond teach us about Black feminist fugitivity and the flight of Africanized honeybees in the Americas? This paper examines the etymological and entomological dimensions of abscondence to investigate the multimodal tactics, dimensions, and technologies of flight and freedom as deployed by Black women in Brazil and the United States. The verb abscond means to hide oneself; to flee into hiding. However, abscond also refers to the survivance strategies of Africanized honeybees (colloquially known as “killer bees”) who abscond or swarm by entirely abandoning their hive or nest to reestablish a new one elsewhere, due to oppressive conditions such as threats of predation, lack of resources, internal hive conditions, environmental extremes, and human interference. Here, I use the process of absconding Africanized honeybees as a comparative political and ecological imaginary to the geographical site of the maroon–freedom settlements formed by self-liberated Africans who, through flight, escaped chattel slavery–and the praxis of Marronage. Utilizing Black Brazilian theorists Beatriz Nascimento and Lélia Gonzalez’s conceptualizations of the quilombo (maroon in Brazilian Portuguese), this work explores how Black women in these respective countries cite, name, mobilize, reference, and even critique each other through revolutionary and infrapolitical transcripts of solidarity and survival––what I call “fieldnotes”. By highlighting the political movement building, cultural references, poetics and symbolic gestures among and between Black women in Brazil and the United States, this paper investigates the afterlives and iterations of Marronage vis-à-vis Black feminist resistance in the Americas in wake of political authoritarianism, anti-Black violence, and the imminent catastrophe of Colony Collapse Disorder in the Anthropocene.