Hostos Community College marked Black History Month with a virtual book presentation and conversation with English Associate Professor Sean Gerrity on Thursday, February 26. The webinar brought faculty, staff, and community members together to explore a lesser-taught history of Black resistance and the literature that preserved it through the experiences of maroons, African descendants in the Americas who escaped slavery and forged independent lives beyond the confines of plantation society. The event centered on Gerrity’s most recent publication from SUNY Press, “Beyond Emancipation: Maroon Freedoms in US Literature, 1850–1862.”
President Cocco De Filippis expressed her delight with Professor Gerrity’s book.
At the opening of the program, President Daisy Cocco De Filippis welcomed attendees and celebrated the scholarly and cultural impact of faculty work at the College. She framed the presentation as part of Hostos’ continuing commitment to scholarship that resonates beyond campus. “Hostos takes great pride in its distinguished faculty members and their work, not only on campus, but also in the realms of academic, scientific, and cultural research. I am so, so proud of Professor Gerrity’s accomplishment.”
Professor Jason Buchanan served as moderator.
Moderated as an in-depth conversation with Jason Buchanan, Chair of the English Department, the webinar offered both an accessible entry point and a rigorous argument about how freedom was imagined, especially at a time when legal emancipation was not a promise anyone could count on.
Gerrity began by grounding the audience in the history itself. “The basic definition of maroons we can think about would be enslaved people who fled from slavery and hid out in remote places like swamps, forests, mountains, wildernesses,” he explained. What makes maroon life especially consequential for his book, he said, is that it unfolded within the very geography of slavery. “Maroons were enslaved people who ran away and did not actually leave the geographical confines of the slave system.”
That paradox, freedom sought not by exiting the system’s map but by inhabiting its margins, shapes the book’s central claim. In landscapes that outsiders described as inhospitable, maroons created forms of survival, community, and resistance. Gerrity stressed the enduring importance of those stories, precisely because they remain undertaught. “No one has ever taught about the maroons in the United States with much detail,” he told the audience, and he argued that these are people whose lives and stories of resistance and autonomy, of freedom seeking, are both unique and essential.
When Buchanan asked why the book focuses on US literature, Gerrity placed his project in a broader hemispheric history. “Maroons existed in every place that slavery existed,” he said, noting that marronage is well documented across the Caribbean and the Americas. In the US context, he described a pivotal scholarly shift, historians uncovering a secret, hidden history of maroon presence, in part because maroon survival depended on remaining undetected. “Maroon survival depended upon not being found,” he said, “and so, it is deliberately hard to detect in history.”
From that historical recovery, Gerrity turned to the question that propelled his own work as a literary scholar. “What about in the literature then,” he asked, “what about in the African American fiction and literary tradition in this country, where do maroons fit into that?”
He found, to his surprise, that he did not have to look far.
“Some of the most celebrated, well-known, and significant authors had been writing about this,” Gerrity said, naming Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. With the historical knowledge historians helped bring to light, he explained, the maroon presence becomes newly legible in texts many readers already consider foundational. The result is not just new content, it is a new way of reading, one that hears whispers and references to fugitivity, hiding, and alternative life in the woods, the swamp, or the edges of town.
One of Gerrity’s signature contributions is elevating a lesser-discussed work by Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” which Gerrity described as a novella, a fictional telling of a real historical story, the 1841 revolt aboard the slave ship Creole led by Madison Washington, an enslaved American cook.
For Gerrity, the literary stakes are high. Fiction gave Douglass room to experiment with political possibility. “With fiction, you can take certain liberties,” he said, “that you can’t with, say, his autobiography,” and those liberties allow Douglass to explore “more radical speculative ways of thinking about what freedom could look like.”
That point led directly into the book’s title and its guiding idea, freedom beyond emancipation.
“The idea of emancipation did not exist in that way beforehand,” Gerrity explained. In the years his book examines, imagining freedom could not depend on a sudden, benevolent reversal by the state. Instead, he argues, Black writers used maroons and maroon communities to think about autonomy and self-determination outside legal permission structures, freedom as practice, not proclamation.
That is the force behind what Gerrity calls maroon freedoms. The phrase, he noted, arrived late in his process, after years of research and revision, because it ultimately named what he had been arguing across the manuscript. “Maroon freedoms are kind of defined by not relying on the good graces and benevolence of others to bestow upon them freedom,” he said. They are “freedoms that are taken rather than granted,” and they are “types of freedom that do not wait for permission.”
By the time the conversation opened to audience questions, the event had become more than a book talk. It was a campus-wide reflection on how Black freedom has been imagined, pursued, and defended, even when the law refused to recognize it.
In the spirit of Black History Month, the webinar served as a reminder that history is not only what happened but also what people dared to imagine in the face of what seemed impossible, and how literature can preserve those visions for new generations of readers.