Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

BAR Book Forum: Ruma Chopra’s “Almost Home”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
03 Apr 2019
BAR Book Forum: Ruma Chopra’s “Almost Home”
BAR Book Forum: Ruma Chopra’s “Almost Home”

This is a story about the ways in which the Maroons positioned themselves within a powerful and expanding empire.

“Claiming descent from the Maroons is a sign of great pride.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Ruma Chopra. Chopra is Professor of History at San José State University.Her book is Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Ruma Chopra:Almost Home speaks to the complexities of race-making, to the gradations within the categories of white and black.The Trelawney Town Maroons faced and overcame a great deal of racial discrimination. This was an essential part of their experience. Without denying this, my work explores the agency they had in making and remaking themselves in the British world. Almost Home  is a story of both racism and agency, and specifically, about the ways in which the Maroons positioned themselves within a powerful and expanding empire.The Maroons were dispossessed in relation to whites but empowered in relation to other marginalized people: In Jamaica, they stood above slaves; in Nova Scotia, they were separate from both blacks and indigenous people; and in Sierra Leone, they were distinct from Africans. 

The book also speaks to the long black struggle for social integration in the Americas. We have tended to think of the Maroons as “freedom fighters” or as tragic, displaced victims of colonial power. But the Maroons were also Americans who wanted to belong and succeed in a world stage. They made pragmatic painful choices to protect their families and their community. They endured.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

Almost Home is a narrative of courage. The Trelawney Town Maroons remained an unvanquished people. A group of about 150 families (550 people) found themselves banished from their homes and shuttled across the Atlantic world, from Jamaica to Nova Scotia, and then to Sierra Leone, in just four years, between 1796 and 1800. Remarkably, some Maroons found their way back home in the 1840s, after the British abolished slavery. 

To this day – more than 200 years after their exile – a small community of ex-slaves remain heroes for people in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. Claiming descent from the Maroons is a sign of great pride. The Maroons’ struggle provides confidence to new generations; their remembered swagger keeps something essential alive in all of us.

“Maroon families manifest the awful contradictions of remaining free in an age of slavery.”

Throughout, the Maroons maneuvered not only to survive but to prosper. They hid their secret blood-oath ceremonies and adopted the names of white patrons. They used their military experience to capture slave runaways in the Jamaican mountains and to suppress black rebels in Sierra Leone. Some Maroons even became slave owners. Maroon families manifest the awful contradictions of remaining free in an age of slavery. 

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

Great question. We have tended to admire outright resistance and to regard accommodation as a tragic last-defense reaction. Sometimes it seems that the only heroes we allow for are those who never cease suffering. I am hoping Almost Home will help us to see accommodation as part of the longer history of slavery. It too had its turbulence, outside the dialectic of obedience and rebellion.

The Maroons were attached to the British world. This provided them with a degree of autonomy, increased their mobility, gave them opportunities for deeper contact with whites, in short, it gave them an understanding of the conventions of white society. The Maroons gained real privileges for their attachment in Jamaica and in exile:Their nuanced grasp of British norms made their marginal condition more manageable in Jamaica, their sense of imperial obligations and their high self-regard gave them the resilience to resist their conditions in Nova Scotia, and their intuitive grasp of British needs in West Africa elevated them in Sierra Leone. 

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

Too many to name and growing daily. Those ready to consider the full range of human behavior in all its contradictions without moralism. Those who complicate the relationship between written history and lived memory. Those working to create pasts in museums, theme parks, historical houses, novels, and films where most people first confront history. 

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

As B. W. Higman has noted, moral judgments elicit emotional responses but also practical action. Despite the whole range of thorny issues bound up with emotions of shame and guilt, perhaps we need to be braver about recognizing this reality. 

One example will suffice. The Maroons were able to survive slavery and maintain their families intact because they maneuvered within the logic of the empire but also because the anti-slavery reformers in Britain transformed them into world news. British evangelicals sentimentalized the Maroons as “poor and helpless refugees” who could not possibly survive the winters of Canada. Black bodies, they agonized, would die drinking cold water in Nova Scotia. This outpouring of emotion over “winter” enabled the Maroons to relocate to Sierra Leone where they became valuable to the empire in a way not possible in Nova Scotia. In Sierra Leone, Maroon children learned English, became clerks, entered Christian marriages, and hired Africans as servants. Of course, this was not as prestigious as becoming part of the established white elite. But we must judge what was won within its actual context. The Maroons, time and time again, reached for everything that was possible. 

Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network.  He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the book,American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

BAR Book Forum

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Sam C. Tenorio’s Book, “Jump”
18 September 2024
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book.
BAR Book Forum: André Brock Jr.’s “Distributed Blackness”
André Brock Jr.
BAR Book Forum: André Brock Jr.’s “Distributed Blackness”
15 July 2021
The online aggregation and coherence of Blackness online, absent Black bodies, is what inspired the author’s book.
BAR Book Forum: Kyla Schuller’s Book, “The Biopolitics of Feeling”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Kyla Schuller’s Book, “The Biopolitics of Feeling”
15 July 2021
The very physical category of femaleness was articulated by feminists and non-feminists alike as the sole property of whiteness in the 19th century
BAR Book Forum: Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice
Dr. Gerald Horne
BAR Book Forum: Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice
23 June 2021
He was stunned to ascertain that Europe was less racist toward those like himself in comparison to his homeland;
BAR Book Forum: Jerrilyn McGregory’s “One Grand Noise”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Jerrilyn McGregory’s “One Grand Noise”
16 June 2021
To break cyclical, systemic oppression requires a functionality that rejects reified notions of governance, global capitalism, and accommodation.
BAR Book Forum: Rachel Afi Quinn’s “Being La Dominicana”
Rachel Afi Quinn
BAR Book Forum: Rachel Afi Quinn’s “Being La Dominicana”
09 June 2021
Dominican racial logic frequently contradicts what US scholars think they know about how race works.
BAR Book Forum: Tiffany N. Florvil’s “Mobilizing Black Germany”
Tiffany N. Florvil
BAR Book Forum: Tiffany N. Florvil’s “Mobilizing Black Germany”
09 June 2021
Black History Month strengthened Black German claims of kinship with their nation and the larger diaspora.
BAR Book Forum: Tamika Nunley’s “At the Threshold of Liberty”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Tamika Nunley’s “At the Threshold of Liberty”
02 June 2021
How Black women gave the term “liberty” its meaning and expanded the scope of liberty in the nation’s capital during the nineteenth century.
BAR Book Forum: Justin Podur and Joe Emersberger’s “Extraordinary Threat”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Justin Podur and Joe Emersberger’s “Extraordinary Threat”
02 June 2021
Western media outlets, NGOs and powerful governments allied with the United States work in unison to deceive people about foreign policy.
BAR Book Forum: Katrinell M. Davis’ “Tainted Tap”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Katrinell M. Davis’ “Tainted Tap”
19 May 2021
Activists and community organizers should be inspired by the work of elders engaged in social change.

More Stories


  • BAR Radio Logo
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio May 9, 2025
    09 May 2025
    In this week’s segment, we discuss the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II, and the disinformation that centers on the U.S.'s role and dismisses the pivotal Soviet role in that…
  • Book: The Rebirth of the African Phoenix
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Rebirth of the African Phoenix: A View from Babylon
    09 May 2025
    Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the UK-based Morning Star, the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world. He joins us from Oxford to discuss his new book, “The…
  • ww2
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Bruce Dixon: US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan Hostility Toward Russia
    09 May 2025
    The late Bruce Dixon was a co-founder and managing editor of Black Agenda Report. In 2018, he provided this commentary entitled, "US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan…
  • Nakba
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Meaning of Nakba Day
    09 May 2025
    Nadiah Alyafai is a member of the US Palestinian Community Network chapter in Chicago and she joins us to discuss why the public must be aware of the Nakba and the continuity of Palestinian…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Ryan Coogler, Shedeur Sanders, Karmelo Anthony, and Rodney Hinton, Jr
    07 May 2025
    Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us