Rumors of Slavery: Defending Emancipation in a Hostile Caribbean

Abstract

Experiences of emancipation varied in the greater Caribbean, from the struggles of the formerly enslaved to carve out autonomy on small sugar islands to those of larger arenas and different modes of production, but everywhere a climate of contest prevailed. In the mid-nineteenth century, the political consciousness of the residents of the deeply rural Dominican Republic demonstrates the deep imbrication of putative "non-plantation" spaces with their surroundings. Their aspirations and fears highlight how subaltern Caribbean residents engaged in regional news networks that brought—rather than liberation stories—tales of retrenchment, hostility, and dynamic imperial threats. Re-enslavement warnings, glossed and dismissed by authorities as "rumor," were rather distinguished by detail and ubiquity; they constituted the new politics of defending an emancipation and independence. When Spanish authorities reoccupied Dominican territory in 1861, Dominican rebels mobilized these warnings and joined together in urgent solidarity. The subsequent erasure of these dynamics, in both local and hemispheric narratives, highlights not only how elites willfully sought to obfuscate the connections of emancipated peoples throughout the Caribbean, but also the great vigilance that emerged to maintain these ties, even in largely subsistence spaces, far from any plantation.