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In How to Lose the Hounds Celeste Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition. She examines historically Black maroon communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, that have been subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day. Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community well-being. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities. Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.
Winner of 2023 Scholars of Color First Book Award, Duke University Press
Praise for How to Lose the Hounds
“Through Celeste Winston’s examination of early Black communities from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as her study of late modern Black communities in the twentieth century, we learn vital lessons about the value of marronage for our understandings of slavery, resistance, liberation, freedom, race, capitalism, and geography. Imagining Black futures beyond slavery and a world without the police, Winston offers a wonderful treatise that will reverberate throughout geography, Black studies, American studies, history, political theory, and decolonial politics. How to Lose the Hounds is an absolutely marvelous book and a magnificent achievement!”
— Neil Roberts, author of Freedom as Marronage
“In How to Lose the Hounds, Celeste Winston explores marronage not just as a practice of Black agency and resistance, but as a technology that holds the blueprint to police abolition. Blending geography, history, and storytelling, this book pushes readers to envision a justice- and care-oriented model of community already seen in many Black neighborhoods, including Montgomery County, where the narrative is centered. A descendant of maroons myself, I was struck by the way Winston takes a folklore and mode of living so often relegated to the past and applies it to our modern crises of over-policing and mass incarceration. A book both imaginative and grounded in material reality, How to Lose the Hounds offers readers a glimpse of a more just future and the hope to move toward it.”
—Daven McQueen, Inquest Assistant Editor
“With its rich account of marronage in Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond, Celeste Winston’s How to Lose the Hounds is a brilliant addition to the study of black flight, geographic transformations, and abolition. How to Lose the Hounds both succeeds as a rigorous study of maroon geographies, maroon justice and other maroon tactics and, importantly, insists that a careful understanding of ‘radical Black praxis of community’ is essential to the work toward police abolition.”
— Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness