Scholarly Manifesto

Nanny of The Maroons: Artist Mark Cameron

I write, I research, I teach with an ancestral drumbeat at my back.

Through my scholarship, I refuse silence. I lift stories of Caribbean resistance, stories of women and men who dared to imagine freedom when the world declared them enslaved. These resistant subjectivities and practices deserve not only inclusion in the historiography of slavery, post-slavery, and post-colonial societies, but recognition as guiding lights in the global struggle for justice.

Analyzing Black History requires a decolonized approach to research that transcends traditional methodologies, especially those reliant solely on quantitative measures. Such approaches often fail to capture the lived experiences, historical contexts, and nuanced realities of Black lives. Instead, decolonized research methodologies embrace holistic, qualitative, and ancestral ways of knowing. These methods honor oral histories, cultural practices, and spiritual understandings that cannot be quantified but are deeply significant (Navigating Black Privilege Across the Globe, p. )

My methodology finds its compass in Nanny of the Maroons. Warrior. Strategist. Mother of Freedom. She is both a historical figure as well as an epistemological framework, an unyielding call to autonomy. Through her, I see how knowledge must be weaponized as healing, how scholarship must be accountable to community, and how resistance is both genetic memory and methodology. (See, From the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter: Ancestral Writing as a Pedagogy of Hope, p. )

To speak of Nanny is to speak of a methodology of fire—of maroonage as praxis, of liberation as theory, of identity as an unbroken thread.

In invoking her, I examine colonization and its brutal aftermath. I celebrate the movements of resistance that carved the path toward emancipation. And I walk with conviction that scholarship, like Nanny’s drum, must awaken, must guide, must call us to gather and rise.