A01=Kathryn Benjamin Golden
antebellum political movements
Author_Kathryn Benjamin Golden
Black ecologies
Black motherhoods
Black women in resistance
Black women's geographies
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
Category=WQH
enslaved women's histories
environmental history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
flight and rebellion
forthcoming
fugitivity
gender and violent protest and defense
Great Dismal Swamp
Maroons and marronage
slave revolt
slavery and reproductive (in)justice
slavery in Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina
Product details
- ISBN 9781469697970
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 27 Oct 2026
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Out of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge morass of swampland straddling the Virginia and North Carolina eastern seaboard, there emerged a distinct culture of enslaved insurgency and fugitive subversion. Maroons who fled enslavement and resettled in wilderness spaces utilized the deep interior swamps to establish permanent, multigenerational autonomous communities. Historian Kathryn Benjmain Golden reveals for the first time the role of Black women in these maroon communities and locates them in the forests, swamps, and records where they have previously evaded detection and attention.
This Insurgent Ground centers the Black women who aided, supported, led, and nurtured maroon movements in the Great Dismal Swamp as they collaborated with enslaved people in rebellion. Throughout the region, Black women resisted the injustices of reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods. Acting as agents of counterintelligence, participants in defensive violence and militant strategy, and mothers and providers of alternative autonomous communities, these women dared to redirect and repossess their energies and their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery and in refusal of borders, bondage, confinement, and capture.
This Insurgent Ground centers the Black women who aided, supported, led, and nurtured maroon movements in the Great Dismal Swamp as they collaborated with enslaved people in rebellion. Throughout the region, Black women resisted the injustices of reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods. Acting as agents of counterintelligence, participants in defensive violence and militant strategy, and mothers and providers of alternative autonomous communities, these women dared to redirect and repossess their energies and their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery and in refusal of borders, bondage, confinement, and capture.
Kathryn Benjamin Golden is assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Delaware.
