Flooding as Remembering: A Trickster’s Guide to Fugitive Ecology, Revolutionary Recall, and Speculative Worldbuilding Beyond the Plantationocene

Abstract

Since the early days of conquest, Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous peoples of the Lower Mississippi River Delta have survived recurrent processes of settler colonial un-worlding by re-worlding sovereign lifeways rooted in reciprocal relationships to other colonized peoples and the environment. Un-worlding occurred to Black and Indigenous peoples through dispossession of land, capture into enslavement, and genocide. This process was intertwined with the un-worlding of the landscape’s agency, which was captured and enclosed into property by arresting waterways’ movements through constrictive engineering using coercive labor. In the Bas de Fleuve swamps (today known as the Louisiana Central Wetlands), self-emancipated fugitives that had escaped enslavement formed autonomous inner worlds in the unenclosed territories between the Mississippi River and Lake Borgne. Known as Maroons, they were led by a leader named Juan San Malò and forged interdependent networks that extended to Indigenous settlements, enslaved Africans on plantations, and free Blacks in New Orleans. By living outside eurosettler logics of property and re-establishing reciprocity with the more-than-human web of life, they demonstrated that the liberation of captive people is bound to the liberation of captive landscapes. Their re-worlding was also reminiscent of the pan-African trickster figure: anarchistic heroes that overturn the dominant oppressive world order for more liberatory realities Today, the destruction of wetlands across Southeast Louisiana means that descendants are facing an un-worlding of the sovereign livelihoods their ancestors re-established generations before. This is due to anthropogenically induced land loss, flooding, storm surge, and saltwater intrusion influenced by extractivist industries. Through revolutionary recall, reclaiming the logics of re-worlding established by Juan San Malò’s band of Maroons offers pathways to resist the intensifying threats of climate change that represent afterlives of slavery. Common Ground Relief is one collective that has drawn from Maroon legacies to lead bottom-up disaster response, mutual aid initiatives, and citizen-led wetland restoration. Drawing from creative land reclamation projects led by Utē Petit, Monique Verdin, the Nanih Bvlbancha Builders, and the Descendants Project, a constellation of small, site-specific projects are also presented to demonstrate how revolutionary recall can become a form of speculation for broader land-based liberation in the Lower Mississippi Delta.