“A Place Where Freedom Means Something”: James Baldwin's Global Maroon Geographies

Despite his vocal support for the Algerian revolution, Palestinian liberation, and the South African anti‐apartheid struggle, James Baldwin has continued to be regarded as a thinker whose work predominantly revolved around themes of civil rights, cross‐racial dialogue, and integration. In this essay, I seek to undomesticate Baldwin in a dual sense: first, by challenging the liberal appropriation of his work; and, second, by bringing debates about decolonisation into conversation with ideas of marronage, statelessness, and fugitive placemaking. By following Baldwin's lifelong journey in and out of the United States, I show how he brought together a global set of struggles against racial capitalism and state‐driven projects of enclosure, captivity, and dispossession. The result was a form of anarcho‐blackness which, rather than seek inclusion in the national home, sought to create new and undomesticated ways of being in the world. Today, as fascist, authoritarian, and genocidal state violence abound, there is much to be learnt from Baldwin's refusal of the nation‐state as the horizon and arbiter of freedom.