HSOC Spring 2025 Speaker Series: Black Women and the Survival of an Exiled Community during the Age of Revolution
Shavagne Scott, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University, explores how Trelawny Maroon women navigated forced exile to Nova Scotia, revealing the gendered dynamics of Black diasporic migrations during the Age of Revolution.
In 1796, 568 Jamaican Maroons, two-thirds of whom were women and children, were exiled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, as punishment for waging war against the colonial Jamaican state. In this talk, Shavagne Scott examines fragmentary archival sources to explore how Trelawny Maroon women experienced and resisted the shifting social and political landscape of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic World. She argues that Black diasporic migrations, both forced and unforced, were deeply gendered processes, shaped by imperial constraints and countered by the strategic resilience of Maroon women in exile.