Three Afro-Cuban spiritual practices—Regla de Palo Monte (Mayombe),
Abakuá, and Regla de Osha (Santería)—are living testaments of African
resistance to European colonisation. The survival of strong African traits
in a mixed-race island in the Caribbean, like Cuba, demonstrates the
successful integration of African philosophies and beliefs in the search for
peaceful co-existence. Through an adaptive process of transculturation,
these three spiritual practices, originally from West and Central Africa,

This article examines the rights of the Maroons in Jamaica in the emerging
ganja industry, based on national, regional, and international law. It
assesses their rights in the context of the land rights of indigenous peoples
and examines how these rights have been applied to marijuana policies
concerning indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, and the
Rastafari community in Jamaica. Finally, it views the indigenous rightsbased
internationalist approach taken by the Charles Town Maroons as a

Neo-slave narratives elucidate the false discourse of freedom and the need
for an ongoing project of abolition. Dionne Brand’s At the full and
change of the moon fits into this tradition, but reflects on the legacies of
specific slaves: the Maroons. By analyzing the development of Terre
Bouillante, the novel’s fictional Maroon settlement, we can see how its
legacy can be detrimental if seclusion is privileged. Yet, for some of this
settlement’s twentieth-century descendants, neo-marronage becomes

This essay considers how literacy, specifically reading, facilitated slave
rebellion in Jamaica in the age of revolutions. During the 1831-1832 slave
uprising, Samuel Sharpe, a literate, enslaved Baptist preacher used literacy
to advance his sense of freedom and organise a non-violent labour strike.
This essay provides an overview of Christian instruction among blacks
prior to emancipation in Jamaica and contextualises the role that reading
played in Sharpe’s insurgent activity. It closes with a reading of fictional

For most antebellum observers, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia
figured as a geography ripe for colonialisation, either economically as
farmland or space for development, or creatively as a haunted and
mysterious wilderness. But the swamp was more than just a geography to
be exploited for profit by powerful white planters; it was also a space of
interaction between slave society and a community of self-freed people of
colour. As scholars have increasingly noted, the swamp provided a sort of

This paper historically situates conservation as a phenomenon, drawing
out its cultural particularity by placing it alongside Jamaican Maroon
environmental philosophies. Conservationists tend to care for non-human
life anonymously, in the abstract, and seldom for particular beings.
Maroons tend to exercise care toward intimately known non-human
others, revealing the potential harm anonymous care can enact when
exercised in places like Jamaica’s Maroon towns. However, emergent