ACH 2024 Conference Program
Migration and Space in Caribbean History:
55th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH)
Santa Marta, Colombia, May 26-30, 2024
Universidad del Magdalena
Sunday, May 26
3:00-5:00pm Registration
5:00-6:30pm Panel 1 (Local Organizing Committee Panel)
6:30-8:00pm Opening Ceremony and Welcome Reception
Monday, May 27
9:15-10:45am Panel 2: Migration and Colonization: Unsettled Archives
Chair: TBD
Rosemarijn Hoefte (KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Caribbean Studies): “Dutch research into the Colonial Past: A Tale of Two Cities”
Elise A. Mitchell (Princeton University): “Smallpox and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World: A Digital History”
Paola Vargas Arana (University of Manchester): “African voyages to Antioquia’s gold mines in New Granada, and the Caribbean mainland/islands relations during the British ‘Asiento’ (1713-1750)”
Nuala Zahedieh (University of Cambridge): “Canoes, commons, and capitalism in the early English Caribbean”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 3: Migration As A Breeding Ground for Resistance
Chair: TBD
Gelien Matthews (University of The West Indies, St. Augustine Campus): “Eliza Fenwick’s Private Account of the Barbados Servile War of 1816”
Armando Garcia de la Torre (Independent Scholar): “The Cultural Clash of Migrations in the Island of Trinidad: The Case of Dominique Dert, 1781-1784”
Heather Freund (University of Copenhagen): “Marronage and the Kalinago of St. Vincent”
Gunvor Simonsen (University of Copenhagen): “A Business of Freedom? Marronage and Maritime Transport in the Nineteenth-Century Lesser Antilles”
12:30-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 4: Circulation and Movement: Trade, Labor and Family Networks
Chair: TBD
Terencia K. Joseph (University of the Southern Caribbean): “Trans-Caribbean Migrations: Indians in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”
Sebastian Gomez Gonzalez (Universidad de Antioquia): “Alias ‘El Mompoxino’ y el negocio del contrabando en el istmo de Panamá y las Antillas, 1730-1746”
Yevan Terrien (University of Louisiana at Lafayette): “Wheel of Misfortune: The Intercolonial Slave Trade between the Caribbean and Colonial Louisiana in the 18th century”
Felicia Fricke (University of Copenhagen): “Maritime Family Networks at Lesser Antillean Free Ports, 1804-1830 (St. Barts, St. Thomas, and Curaçao)”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30pm-5:00pm Panel 5: New Research on Abolition: The Caribbean and West Africa
Chair: TBD
Chair: Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester)
Henry B. Lovejoy (University of Colorado Boulder): “Quantifying ‘Liberated Africans’ in the Greater Caribbean, 1807-1866”
Suzanne Schwarz (University of Worcester): “Interrupted Middle Passages: Tracing the Movements and Identities of ‘Liberated Africans’ Released from Slave Ships”
Mégane Coulon (Susquehanna University): “Transatlantic Connections: The Caribbean and the Colony of Sierra Leone”
Erika Melek Delgado (King’s College London): “The labour experiences of Liberated African children in Matanzas, Cuba (1840-1880)”
Tuesday, May 28
9:15-10:45am Panel 6: Migration and Reversals of Belonging in the Caribbean Borderlands: Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Garifuna New York, 1850s-Today
Chair: Laura Rosanne Adderley (Tulane University)
Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh): “Violence Against Afro-Caribbean Immigrants in Venezuela, 1850-1950: A Regional and Comparative Assessment”
Sharika D. Crawford (United States Naval Academy): “From North End to Pañatown: How the Free Port and Tourism Sector Spurred Migration that Transformed the Colombian Island of San Andrés, 1953 -1972”
Kaysha Corinealdi (Emerson College): “Denationalization in Comparative Perspective: Panama and the Dominican Republic (1941-Present)”
Paul Joseph López Oro (Bryn Mawr College): “Central America’s Caribbean Coasts in/of Diaspora: Garifuna New Yorkers in the 21st Century”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 7: Transnational Caribbean Actors and the Making of Blackness in the Greater Circum-Caribbean
Chair: Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh)
Felix Jean-Louis (University of California): “For the Race, for the Fatherland: Haitian Internationalism in the Age of Global Blackness”
Tyesha Maddox (Fordham University): “Friends of Abyssinia: West Indian Immigrant Mutual Aid Societies and the Impact of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War”
Willie Mack (University of Missouri): “‘Triple Minority’: Haitian Immigrants, Policing, Race and Identity in New York City and Haiti, During the Cold War”
J. Marlena Edwards (Pennsylvania State University): “An Unintended Modality: American Whaling, Labor, and Race-Making in New Bedford Massachusetts, 1870-1930”
12:30-1:45pm Lunch
1:45-3:15pm Panel 8: Accommodating Practices
Chair: TBD
Dexnell Peters (University of the West Indies, Mona Campus): “Religious pluralism, missionaries and the integration of the Greater Southern Caribbean in the Revolutionary Era”
John Balz (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “How Virgin Islands Dutch Creole Became Black: Translation, Christianity, Language Ideology, and Race in the Danish West Indies, 1736-1775”
Kristen Block (University of Tennessee): “Medicinal Springs in the Early Caribbean: Disfiguring Ailments and Permeability in Creole Healing Stories”
José Andrés Fernández Montes de Oca (University of Costa Rica): “Afro-Caribbean Peasantry in the Costa Rican Caribbean: Land Tenure, Mobility, and Ethnicity, 1870-1970”
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30-5:00pm Panel 9: Reclaiming the Dutch Caribbean Space Within A Larger Regional Historical Context
Chair: TBD
Rose Mary Allen (University of Curaçao): “Reclaiming the Dutch Caribbean space within a larger regional historical context”
Margo Groenewoud (independent scholar): “Dutch Caribbean Radicals and the Spaces they Claimed”
Donate B. Philbert-Nieveld (University of Curaçao): “How regional and non-regional migration processes during the mid-nineteenth century influenced religious practices in the (Dutch) Caribbean”
Raimie Richardson, Camiel de Kom, and Arminda Franken-Ruiz (Department of History and Heritage for the Public Entity of St. Eustatius): “Towards Accessibility: Empowering (Dutch) Caribbean communities with diasporic colonial collections”
Wednesday, May 29
9:15-10:45am Panel 10: Rethinking Repatriation: Legacies of Colonial Collecting in the Caribbean
Chair: Alissandra Cummins (Barbados Museum and Historical Society)
Shani Roper (University of the West Indies): “Repatriation, Colonial Collecting and its Impact on National Natural History collections in Jamaica”
Tara Inniss (University of the West Indies, Cave Hill): “Loss, Repair and Repatriation: Caribbean Objects and Collections in British Museums”
Arminda Franken-Ruiz (Independent Heritage Consultant): “The Return of Artifacts from Colonial Collections and its Effect on Museums and their Communities: The case of the National Archaeological Museum of Aruba and the Wereldmuseum in Leiden”
Katarina Jacobson (Saint John Perse municipal museum): “The Return of Artifacts from Colonial Collections and its Effect on Museums and their Communities. From colonies to departments: what about objects ‘collected’ in France’s overseas territories?”
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00am-12:30pm Panel 11: Choices, Decisions and Policies In A Global Context of Changes
Chair: TBD
Diana Paton (University of Edinburgh) and Juanita de Barros (McMaster University): “Policing Public Space in Post-Slavery British Guiana, 1881-1897”
Anasa Hicks (Florida State University): “Decolonial Decisions: Cuba’s Choice at the Outset of Angolan Independence”
Joy D Lewis (Morgan State University): “The Two Virgin Islands: A Case Study in Transnational Interdependency”
In the tradition of the Association of Caribbean Historians Conference, Wednesday afternoon is left unscheduled to allow participants the opportunity to explore the historic sites and cultural opportunities of Santa Marta.
Thursday, May 30
9:15-10:45am Panel 12: Migrants in the Colombian Caribbean in the 20th Century: Discourses, Diplomacy and Business
Chair: Julián Lázaro Montes (Universidad de Cartagena)
Ana Milena Rhenals Doria (Universidad Industrial del Santander): “De la xenofobia a la solidaridad transnacional: los obreros de Cartagena y la presencia de migrantes antillanos en Colombia durante el ascenso del socialismo, 1910-1930”
Laura De Moya-Guerra (Rutgers University): “Las inmigrantes chinas en el Carnaval de Barranquilla (Colombia) y la diplomacia de género de Taiwán, 1960-1980”
Neil Del Valle Villarreal (Politecnico de la Costa Atlántica): “El almacén norteamericano SEARS en la Barranquilla de la ‘Prosperidad de Milagro’ (1953)”