This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

This chapter focuses on the spiritual world of enslaved people and the ways in which politicized consciousness and resistance were infused in ritual practices. This chapter is theoretically grounded by insights from the social movements field related to the politicization of social spaces and the role of cultural artifacts in social movements. I frame spiritual and ritual gatherings as free spaces where participants’ oppositional consciousness and sense of racial solidarity was enhanced through holding audience to anti-slavery and racial consciousness rhetoric; employing spiritual technologies to protect oneself and attract good fortune, usurping ultimate power from white plantation owners and asserting personal agency; and using marronnage to organize and recruit new ritual participants.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter focuses on the spiritual world of enslaved people and the ways in which politicized consciousness and resistance were infused in ritual practices. This chapter is theoretically grounded by insights from the social movements field related to the politicization of social spaces and the role of cultural artifacts in social movements. I frame spiritual and ritual gatherings as free spaces where participants’ oppositional consciousness and sense of racial solidarity was enhanced through holding audience to anti-slavery and racial consciousness rhetoric; employing spiritual technologies to protect oneself and attract good fortune, usurping ultimate power from white plantation owners and asserting personal agency; and using marronnage to organize and recruit new ritual participants.