Utopia to apocalypse

This essay examines the transformation of marronage in contemporary Martinican literature through the figure of the urban maroon, situating the city as a site where utopian aspiration and apocalyptic disillusion converge. Drawing on novels by Patrick Chamoiseau and Alfred Alexandre, it traces how marronage evolves from an emancipatory practice associated with flight and resistance into a reconfigured mode of urban survival shaped by the constraints of postcolonial modernity. While Chronique des sept misères presents a vision of urban stagnation and loss, Texaco reimagines marronage as a collective, spatial, and ecological practice of creole world-making. In contrast, Bord de Canal depicts a dystopian urban landscape in which mobility and resistance collapse altogether. Engaging work on utopianism and the ‘apocalyptic turn’ in Caribbean studies, the essay argues that the urban maroon emerges as both the inheritor of emancipatory possibility and the witness to its limits, revealing the tensions between hope and catastrophe that structure representations of urban space in Martinique.

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence through the support of the Winthrop-King Institute: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .