Black Freedom Dreams in Dominican Society: Anna Kingsley’s Mezzo-Colonial Thought, 1838–46

In a geopolitical landscape of slavery, revolution, and independence movements, an initial six thousand African American emigrants docked in Haiti in the 1820s, and more soon followed. Many of these freed emigrants heard of the forested terrain of 'Spanish Hayti' in African American newspapers and knew of its reputation as a Black refuge. Invited by Haitian President Jean-Peirre Boyer, who recently united Spanish Hayti and the Republic of Haiti under one flag, these emigrants were promised land, seed, and citizenship. Among them, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley (1793-1870) was a freed African woman, plantation owner, and enslaver from Florida who emigrated to Puerto Plata in 1838. This presentation analyzes how Anna navigated and resisted her coercive lifelong relationship with her enslaver, emancipator, and common-law husband, Zephaniah Kingsley. I argue that Anna molded a distinctive praxis of liberation by owning property, enslaved people, and sharing queer intimacies with her co-wives. I read her divergent practices as a mezzo-colonial praxis. Mezzo-coloniality is a Black feminist practice of liberation within, in between, and in the shadows of colonial power and state surveillance. This work enumerates the Black feminist ways Anna Kingsley made her own forms of freedom in Dominican society.