Maroon Geographies, Black Placemaking, and Abolitionist Futures: A Conversation with Celeste Winston

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Celeste Winston about her recent book How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World Beyond Policing from Duke University Press. Dr. Winston’s book intervenes in practical and academic discussions about police abolition by arguing that Black maroon communities’ practices of flight from enslavement and policing can offer historical and contemporary insights for organizing a world without police. For Dr. Winston, “maroon geographies” are constructive sites where Black people have improvised and negotiated different relations to state power.

Dr. Winston’s book focuses on a group of historically Black maroon communities in Montgomery County, Maryland to show the historical continuities between modes of social formation in flight from slavery and from modern policing. Ultimately, the book is a call to abolition theory and praxis to attend to how these communities and others like them have “held ground” amidst overwhelming anti-Black state violence.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Elijah Levine: I wanted to begin with a question about the project as a whole—I’m always interested in the timeline or the evolution of a project and how it ends up in a form. How did you encounter the communities in your book, and when did you know this was going to be a book?

Celeste Winston: I started with this feeling that in places that had been shaped by flight from slavery, or marronage, that I might be able to find lessons for building a world without police today. And that feeling was generated from some work that I had done in graduate school—specifically, I had read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and he argues that we should take seriously marronage as an ongoing Black radical tradition. I was also reading Freedom as Marronage by Neil Roberts, who argues that scholars should reorient our epistemology of freedom around marronage. 

I was also holding a lot of these questions around what safety beyond policing should look like, because, at the time, I was working with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and I was living in New York and going to the CUNY Graduate Center. And the year before, in 2014, then NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had called for the need for at least 1,000 more police officers. And that followed just months after Eric Garner was killed by NYPD officers. So, I was thinking a lot about calls for safety beyond policing, and also holding this kind of imperative to take seriously marronage as this ongoing kind of abolitionist tradition and struggle and an even intellectual project. And that’s really how the question came together and that kind of feeling, which then took me to the archives in Montgomery County, Maryland. 

I had known that I wanted to do research somewhere close to home. Research is such an extractive process, so I wanted to have some kind of tie to the place that I was doing research so that there would be a built-in way for me to situate myself and come back to that place and not just leave it after the research. And so I found myself in these archives, and Montgomery County, as I write about in the book, has this really long history of Black flight from slavery. Part of it is tied to the Underground Railroad running through Maryland and D.C.. Also, there were over 40 black communities that were established by Black people who had either been emancipated from slavery, or who were self-emancipated and descendants of Black people who had been enslaved. These communities have these deep histories, and they gave me such an opening to be able to look for connections between marronage and ongoing safety beyond policing. 

EL: Because the ambitions of the project are certainly beyond the book and beyond the academy, how might the book manuscript serve other parts of this project?

CW: Part of it is having conversations like these, because I know this work just living on a page is not enough. So, I’m trying to breathe life into this work through conversation. I’ve also been really intentional about doing book talks, not just in the university setting. I’ve gone to community-based bookstores where I’m able to have conversations with people who are on the ground, organizing, thinking through these kinds of questions, and directly connecting some of the examples of abolitionist life and placemaking in my book to work that they’re doing, which has been really important and inspiring for me.

EL:  Your analysis of maroon geographies in Montgomery County ties historical practices of marronage and flight from enslavement to contemporary modes of resistance to anti-Black policing and alternative modes of social organization. You’re traversing the antebellum era, the postbellum era, Jim Crow, post-civil rights, neoliberal economic restructuring, and revanchism in the 1970s. How do you balance the historical resonances with the material particularities of a particular era?

CW: One of the interventions I’m making by giving name to maroon geographies is to highlight that marronage isn’t just a form of flight but is also deeply a practice of placemaking. Because of that, there are these kind of material legacies that continue to shape places that once were characterized by a Black flight from slavery, or other kinds of Black freedom projects that maybe weren’t even directly tied to flight from slavery, but are connected in the sense of fugitivity and the kind of freedom dreams that are inherent in those struggles. 

The way that I’m able to traverse so much time in my book is rooted in that understanding that marronage is making place and is not just taking place in an ephemeral sense. And I actually had a historian read a draft of my manuscript, who asked me a really important question that always makes me smile, because it is very much a historian’s question. And it was, how can you jump so much time in your work? Are you making these arguments about causality? What kind of historical continuity are you trying to point towards here?

And that’s really where the kind of rebellious methodology comes into my work. I’m able to jump from 1845 to 1972, and then go up into the 90s, and then go back in time because I am not arguing for this kind of causal relationship. But instead, I’m pointing us towards these material manifestations of Black people’s flight from slavery and other forms of racial violence as a way to draw connections across time. There end up being these really multi-generational infrastructures where residents in Montgomery County, Maryland (and other maroon geographies as well) are able to continuously disrupt power relations and structures, like those of policing.

EL: Your engagement with fugitive infrastructures points to the ways that there are improvised modes of socialization in the wake of and against overwhelming state violence, and provides a historical rejoinder to the idea that abolition is a matter of forging a totally new formation, one with no sort of prerequisite. I wonder about this book’s relationship to broader abolition struggles.

CW: In the book, I touch on some of the more dominant arguments about police abolition in ways that push back against some of the locations or frameworks with which people are imagining a world beyond police. I write in the book, more generally, that we don’t have to imagine abolition or a world beyond policing from scratch. It’s not just this kind of abstract imaginative project, but that there is evidence really written into our world. There’s evidence in the archives, there’s evidence if we talk to people. We can even look into our own experiences, many of us, and think about times where we didn’t call the police. And what did we do instead? What kinds of relationships do we already practice that are already parts of the world without police that we are envisioning? 

The book really is about helping people to ground future visions for a world beyond policing within the present and the past, and specifically, highlighting the places where Black communities that have been subjected to some of the most brutal excesses of police violence as central models for a world beyond policing.

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Featured Image: “The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom” by Wilbur H. Siebert, The Macmillan Company, 1898.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Celeste Winston is an abolitionist geographer and Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. She received a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work centers everyday Black life and placemaking practices as models for liberation. She aims to generate evidence for more livable and equitable geographies by tracing the legacies of Black alternative ways of living and building communities across space and time. Her first book How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World Beyond Policing was published by Duke University Press in 2023. Contact.

Elijah Levine is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on sound in black cultural and literary production between the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the middle of the 1980s. He is interested in how sound was mobilized to convey divergent ideas of blackness following the unfulfilled promises of the Civil Rights Movement and shifting material conditions often generalized under the term deindustrialization. Contact.