In Stealing Away: African Diaspora Maroon Poetics Suzette Spencer, a candidate for the Ph.D. in African- American Studies, uses the history, culture and traditions of Maroon societies in the Caribbean and the United States to locate a grammar of Maroonage–a structure of historically informed Maroon patterns and constituent elements–that underlies Afro-American and Caribbean literatures. What Spencer calls a “thread of maroonage,” further, underlines enslaved women’s strategic interventions to resist conceptions of their bodies, either legally or socially, as sexual property. The project is intended to develop an African Diasporic literary theory and to serve as a basis for examining the crises in ownership over the black body as it was experienced by both emancipated and enslaved subjects in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.