Feeling/thinking the archive: Participatory mapping Marronage

Abstract

This article develops a decolonial participatory method to map the geographies of descendants of fugitives from slavery, or Maroons, to disrupt white-Mestizo constructions of Latin American territories. Maroon-descendant communities can take advantage of existing archives and their extensive oral history to explain their territorial development from a home-grown perspective. With the researcher's assistance, members of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, used their knowledge and emotions as a lens through which to analyse colonial records to map their territory from both a historical and present day perspective. Feeling/thinking about dispossession and resistance while counter-using the colonial archive to reclaim Afro-descendant territory is a subversive undertaking, one that is engrained in the legacy of Maroon resistance.