Perverse Freedoms: Genealogies of Black Resistance in Hispaniola

Abstract

In this dissertation project, I reconstruct an ongoing episode in the history of Black resistance on the island of La Hispaniola through a re-reading of historical and contemporary representations of the maroon town of San Lorenzo de los Negros Mina (Los Mina) in East Santo Domingo as perverse. The word perverse in its etymological roots, perversus, indicates that something is per “a través” (through) and versus “vuelto” (turned), “al revés” (made inside out). Through this study, I demonstrate that the perverse is an analytic lens that can help us place back the locus on the systems to which Black freedom and the persistence of Black life become a symptom of unforgivable transgression, while simultaneously illuminating the modes of resistance that Black and Afro-descendent people in the island practice every day and that have been termed as perverse by laic and religious authorities across time. Through a creative historical and cultural analytical approach, I read against the grain of colonial, historical, and popular representations of Los Mina to locate everyday acts that signal resistance, evasions, negations, and reaffirmations of the sacred against anti-Black systemic formations in the Dominican Republic and the colony of Santo Domingo. La Hispaniola was the first permanent settlement of the Spanish and the first port kidnapped Africans set foot on in the Americas. It was also the site of the revolution that inaugurated the first Black Republic. This study places Los Mina in a genealogy of Black resistance in the island that culminated in the Haitian Revolution, and that started with the first enslaved revolt in the island in 1521. Yet Los Mina’s history has been consistently divorced from this revolutionary history. Through a close examination of archival, secondary, and fictional sources on Los Mina and Black resistance in Hispaniola, I demonstrate that the history of Los Mina has been concealed, fragmented, and misrepresented in colonial and national Dominican historiography due to the continued specter of Black self-determination and persistence that it represents, an antithesis to a Dominican nationalist investment in crafting the nation as other than Black, in contradistinction to the neighboring country of Haiti starting in the late nineteenth century.