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Full-Text Articles in Latin American History
The Exile Of Assata Shakur: Marronage And American Borders, Joe Kaplan
The Exile Of Assata Shakur: Marronage And American Borders, Joe Kaplan
History Theses
Former Black Panther, Assata Shakur, now living in exile in Cuba after breaking out of a U.S. prison, is a self-described escaped slave, or maroon. Shakur has adopted this identity to underscore how practices and ideologies developed under slavery continue to structure Black life in the Americas, and how resistance strategies produced by this historical milieu remain salient in critiques of modern U.S. state power. The transnational nature of Shakur’s flight points to the use of borders as a highly effective, yet overlooked, tactic of Black resistance that has both historical and contemporary relevance. For maroons, borders mark hard distinctions …
Assata Shakur: The Battle For Memory In The Imagined Borderlands, Joe Kaplan
Assata Shakur: The Battle For Memory In The Imagined Borderlands, Joe Kaplan
Summer Research
This work focuses on the former Black Panther, Assata Shakur, and her exile in Cuba. It probes Shakur’s identification with the maroon, or escaped slave, to examine how the experience of exile creates a sense of rootlessness and alienation from national identity, and how memory can come to reshape one’s inclusion within various “imagined communities.” Shakur occupies a liminal space, a borderlands existence, between the two nations in which she has lived. I trace her memories of the terror she experienced in the U.S, the ethnocentrism inherent in the act of becoming American, and how her imagination has been shaped …