"In the Cypress Forest's Dark Embrace": Marronage as In/Civility in Albery Allson Whitman's The Rape of Florida

Violence seems to run through any imaginable relationship to civility, coloring both the initial establishment and perpetuation of a civil society and any resistance to that society. The colonial violence grounding civility in... [ view full abstract ]

Violence seems to run through any imaginable relationship to civility, coloring both the initial establishment and perpetuation of a civil society and any resistance to that society. The colonial violence grounding civility in the United States decimates those it excludes from the civil order while demanding the constitutive subjection of those it includes. This paper tracks those who seek to remove themselves from this double-bind, examining the formation of a different order of civility in the forests and swamps of Florida. Using Albery Allson Whitman’s 1884 poem as our guide, this paper will examine representations of wildness and categories of (in)civility in the afterlives of marronage. The wildness of maroon communities of Florida is depicted in Whitman’s poem, as in earlier natural histories, as a closer proximity to the natural world, often expressed in representations of sexuality transgressing the civil order and approaching the animal. Whitman’s poem positions itself in ambivalent relation to both the civil and the wild, torqueing between the two to find a different civility, grounded in the deeper ecological embeddedness whose representational history has been so fraught, but which nonetheless offers a vision of relation without domination that allows us to shift our understanding of civil society into collective life.