Thomas approaches Sylvia Wynter's manuscript "Black Metamorphosis" from two directions at once, as a study of maroonage and as an instance of it. The starting point is a line from Aimé Césaire, "Marronnons-nous," let us maroon, which Thomas treats as a neglected instruction and uses to track what Césaire's thinking meant for Wynter across the span of her career.

The claim that follows is double. Read on its own terms, the manuscript contributes to scholarship on maroonage in the narrow, conventional sense. But it also pushes past that sense, refusing to leave maroonage fixed as a bounded empirical reference to be catalogued.

Wynter's own phrase, "species of maroonage," gives Thomas his measure, and the essay counts the manuscript itself as one of those species: a sweeping political undertaking of African and diasporic resistance with anchor points across the Americas.