Image and Imagination: Re-Visioning the Maroons in the Morant Bay Rebellion

Abstract

This study undertakes a reassessment of the actions of the Jamaican Maroons in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, an episode in history that has remained controversial to the present day. Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary written sources, present-day Maroon oral traditions and two recently rediscovered nineteenth-century photographs of Maroons who helped suppress the rebellion, the author attempts to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the actual context within which these people operated, the complex constraints they faced and the likely motivations behind the stance they took. By bringing the multiple perspectives contained in these varied sources into a single conversation, the article aims to complicate the prevailing imagery that has tended to reduce these Maroons to one or the other of two equally problematic unidimensional representations—either “heroes,” or “traitors to their race.”

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