The first two papers explore Hispaniola’s Afro-diasporic intersections through the common theme of marronage. Derby begins by examining the Cocorícamo, a carnival trickster figure that traveled to the Haitian-Dominican border with Cuban emigrés, and whose costume resembled the attire of eighteenth century Dominican maroons in El Maniel. Across the Caribbean, maroon communities like El Maniel lived autonomously in hinterlands, yet still interacted with colonial regimes and thus occupied a liminal space, sometimes relying on trickery for survival. Monegro’s paper explores a similar dynamic through the life of Anna Kingsley, an enslaved Black woman and the sexual consort of Zephaniah Kingsley. After freeing Anna and their children, Zephaniah sent them to Puerto Plata where Anna recreated familial intimacies. In contrast to the Cocorícamo’s masculinity, Monegro develops the Black feminist concept of mezzo-coloniality to analyze how Anna found metaphorical marronage “in the shadows of colonial power and state surveillance.”

The last two papers probe Afro-diasporic ties through African American cultural and political institutions. Analyzing African American Protestant congregations in Puerto Plata and Samaná, Davidson demonstrates how US Black emigrants on the island forged Black religious community. Although emigrants affiliated with British Wesleyan missionaries in the 1830s, by the 1860s the congregations were decidedly self-governing Black churches. Davidson shows how the emigrants’ creation of an ‘invisible institution’ linked these communities to US Black church culture in contradiction to white British colonial oversight and Dominican Catholic hegemony. Jean-Louis’s paper then shows how ties between African Americans and the island of Hispaniola continued into the twentieth century. Much like African American emigrants of the 1820s, the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson felt drawn to Port-au-Prince during the United States’s Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) because of African Americans’ and Haitians’ common African heritage. The NAACP’s anti-occupation campaign also regenerated nineteenth-century racial solidarities as the NAACP promoted global Black solidarity. In this arena, Haitians once again became vanguards of Black modernity, models of what Jean-Louis terms “the international new negro political agenda.”

As an expert in Hispaniola’s transnational history, April Mayes will chair the panel, which brings together well-established and new historians of Dominican and Haitian studies. By exploring nineteenth and early-twentieth century Afro-diasporic intersections on the island of Hispaniola, this panel challenges state-driven narratives and pushes the scholarly boundaries regarding the island’s Black history.