Resonant Flight: Marronage Beyond the Jazz Imaginary

Abstract This article explores the historical and theoretical intersections between marronage and jazz through a critical analysis of archival records, musical practices, and Black ecological practice. Situating this discussion within the framework of Black geographies, the article draws on the works of Nathaniel Mackey, Édouard Glissant, Sidney Bechet, and Fred Moten to illuminate how fugitive musicianship in antebellum New Orleans shaped the social and cultural contours of Black music throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through antebellum police records that depict unauthorized musical gatherings of runaways and free people of color, this article highlights the role of music in constructing maroon ecologies and horizontal social relations practiced by Louisianan Black communities through Reconstruction and beyond. Employing a methodology that blends music “history from below” with what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, the study examines the intertwined spatial, ecological, and sonic dimensions of marronage. The framework of “maroon resonance” helps contextualize the aurality of antebellum fugitivity and offers a renewed lens to understand jazz as a site of radical transformation and liberation.