Rhizo/spora: The “In-Betweenness” Of Archival Space, Place, And Body reimagines the mangrove swamp which is often represented as a space of underdevelopment or one that is inhospitable for “civilized” subjects as a place of transformation and a key site of black freedom struggle. What are the cultural products that fill in the breaks of history for those of us who have come out on this side of the Atlantic remade, remixed, anew? This dissertation seeks to respond to all these questions “seen”, “read”, and “performed” through the vernacular traditions of Middle Passage-descended black Africans in the Americas. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow offered us an unfortunately flawed representation of “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” where the enslaved African bore the hieroglyphics of disgrace. As a result, the “earth-bound” body was represented as incapable of pursuing a line of flight out of what Édouard Glissant labels as a “dead-end” situation that is the plantation structure. In contrast, this work will show how the swampy mangroves of the U.S. Coastal South, the Caribbean, and West Africa were interstitial spaces or what I coin as “para-plantation” landscapes deemed as sites of possibility for enslaved Africans in the Americas. My offering of the “para-plantation” including mangrove swamps, other waterways, as well as caves, hills, mountains, forests, and jungles delineate alternative “geographies” that run adjacent to the enclosed production of space created by the plantocracy. These ‘maroon’ landscapes provide modes of transgression, fugitivity, and freedom struggle for the captured body against all forms of enclosure.