Paper short abstract:

This paper considers my role as a diasporic researcher, whose awe and veneration of Jamaican Maroons both upends and reinforces the violence of allyship. The shadow puppets of my childhood has become the abstract figures of my contemporary work and the vacant bodies within my conservation narratives

Paper long abstract:

As a child, I would hear during my time in Jamaica about the Maroons. These shadowy, historic, slick, black figures that represented hope, freedom, revolt, and the pregnability of the British Empire. Our collective fighting figurines, the nation’s pulse beating defiantly in the high hinterlands. When I began to explore their forest use as part of my PhD, what was meant to be a reverent ode to the group I had exalted for so long, rapidly descended into the technopolitical world of conservation as I became embroiled in how stakeholders navigated the announced designation of Maroon ancestral land as a protected area. Quiet, indulgent contemplation of centuries-old practices became fodder for conservation efforts and narratives. Around their world – which lay not static, but in perpetual reconstruction as they themselves became manufactured by and manufacturers of capitalist economies – I began to construct fossilised narratives: replacing the organic compounds of their world with mineralised, hardened substitutes aimed at providing long, sustained agency to the Maroon community with whom I worked. Hard, brittle narratives made of glass words describing glass worlds.

This paper considers the role of the diasporic researcher, whose awe and veneration both upends and reinforces the violence of allyship as the shadow puppets of our childhoods become the abstract figures of our contemporary work and the vacant bodies within conservation narratives.