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The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute is pleased to host a panel discussion on the enslavement and experiences of Black Africans in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, particularly in La Española and Puerto Rico, two of the earliest colonies. This event will feature with in-person and virtual distinguished speakers. Attendance to the event is possible in-person or virtually.

Following the launch of the volume  (SUNY Press, Afro-Latinx Futures series, 2024), edited by Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel, the panel will gather several of the contributors to the book, who will share conclusions and insights from their research. The presentations in the panel and the related contributions in the edited volume Transatlantic Bondage discuss topics such as the development and application of slavery laws, disobedience and its consequences, migration, gender, family, lifestyle, and community building among the free Black population and white allies.

Panel moderated in-person by:

 
Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor in the Department of History, Howard University; author of author of (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Featured speakers (either in-person or virtually) include:

Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, where she teaches Dominican history and the history of Latinos in the U.S. Her research focuses on gender-based violence since the colonial period and free and enslaved black women in Santo Domingo during the 16th-18th centuries.
 

Dr. Jorge L. Chinea, Academic Director, Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Wayne State University, a specialist in colonial Latin American history and the author of (University Press of Florida, 2005).
 

Dr. Jacqueline Jimenez Polanco, Associate Professor of Sociology, Bronx Community College, CUNY, author of  (Routledge, 2024),  (ed.; Routledge, 2023), and  (ind., 2023)

Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo, community activist and independent researcher, former Assistant Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, author of  (CUNY DSI, 2019).

Dr. Richard L. Turits, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, History, and Latin American Studies, William & Mary, author of (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), written with Laurent Dubois, and (Stanford University Press, 2003)

For over a decade, CUNY DSI has been at the forefront of the scholarship on 15th and 16th-centuries La Española and the history of the earliest rebellions of African Black enslaved people in the Americas. Previous initiatives in this research program include the creation of the first online and interactive in 2013 and the launch of the academic and educational digital platform a bilingual English-Spanish website featuring the story of the earliest Black African population of the Americas through archival manuscripts, in 2016.

The volume Transatlantic Bondage stems from that research, capturing in various chapters the presentations made by featured speakers in the symposium “Colonial Slave Legislations and Slavery in the Americas," organized by CUNY DSI in collaboration with the Black Studies Program at t¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ and Harvard Afro-Latin American Studies Research Institute at the Hutchings Center, on October 17, 2014. Participants included scholars from across the United States and Spain.