Dominican Crossroads: An Interview with Christina C. Davidson

In today’s post, Kiana Knight, a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University, interviews interdisciplinary historian Christiana C. Davidson about her first book, Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2024). Professor Davidson is a historian of the Caribbean and African diaspora and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian, she studies religion and racial formation in the modern Americas. Her first book, Dominican Crossroads examines these themes through the life of the first Black US consul and AME missionary to the Dominican Republic. She also explores evolving notions of race in the present through my ongoing ethnographic research with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in the Dominican Republic.

Kiana Knight (KK): In your acknowledgements, you mention that this project evolved out of your tenure in the Dominican Republic as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Could you elaborate on how that experience ultimately led to the creation of Dominican Crossroads?

Christina C. Davidson (CDC): In Dominican Crossroads, I argue that at the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (the first colonial city of the Americas), became a metaphorical crossroads where various people—Dominicans, Black and white Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans—used moral discourse to debate Black men’s capacity for citizenship and political authority. I show that concepts of morality were based in Christian (Catholic and Protestant) worldviews and formed a currency of power that gave individuals interpretative authority over the past and present, enabling them to direct the future. To make this argument, I use the biography of Henry Charles Clifford (H.C.C.) Astwood (b. 1844), a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the first Black man named U.S. consul to Santo Domingo. An understudied historical figure, Astwood was also a polemical politician whose life epitomized the trickster figure in Afro-diasporic folklore and religion.

As religion is central to my analysis, it was also central to my coming to this project. I am not Dominican and prior to 2007, I did not have any connections in Santo Domingo. However, as an African American from the Chicagoland area, I was raised African Methodist and was very active in the AME Church. When it came time for me to study abroad as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellow, my parents wanted me to have local contacts in Santo Domingo. They reminded me that the AME Church has congregations in the Dominican Republic and suggested that I reach out to the bishop then presiding over the Caribbean region, Rev. Carolyn Tyler Guidry, who subsequently put me in contact with a Dominican AME church. It was only after my arrival to Santo Domingo that I began to wonder why the AME Church exists in the Dominican Republic in the first place. Everything I had read about the Dominican Republic to that point said that most Dominicans did not identify as Black and were devout Catholics. Why then was there an African Methodist church in the country?

This question led me to study nineteenth century Dominican and Haitian history (given that the Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola). I learned that Dominican anti-Blackness (and anti-Haitianism) was not preordained, but was a product of a complicated history in which the island’s eastern population responded over time to various forces including: slavery, anti-black racism across the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), European colonialism, the island’s unification under Haiti (1822-1844), Haiti’s indemnity to France (1825), US economic and military interventions, and the whole island’s struggle for liberty across the course of two centuries. In studying this history, I also learned that thousands of African Americans left the United States for Haiti in the nineteenth century. The greatest mass movement occurred between the years 1824 and 1826, when US Blacks settled both in the western and the eastern regions (Dominican Republic) of unified Haiti. The AME Church was heavily involved in orchestrating this early emigration but eventually lost touch with the migrants. When Astwood became US consul in 1882, the AME Church appointed him as its missionary to Santo Domingo and tasked him with reestablishing ties to the emigrants and their descendants in the city. My research for Dominican Crossroads began here, as my interest in the emigration history extended from my own experience of religious diaspora during study abroad.

KK: You consulted archives in the Dominican Republic, United Kingdom, United States along with a host of newspapers and genealogical databases. How has your interdisciplinary training in Latin American & Caribbean history, African American Studies, and Religious Studies influenced your approach to archival research for this project?

CDC: I completed my Ph.D. in History at Duke University in 2017. At that time, I knew that I wanted to write a book that departed from my dissertation, which examined AME history in Santo Domingo and Haiti. I had learned about H.C.C. Astwood’s work as an AME missionary. However, I also knew that Astwood was infamous in the Dominican Republic for his attempt to broker a deal to lease Christopher Columbus’s remains from the Dominican Republic and parade them around the United States. The “Columbus bones scheme” caused an international scandal when it was discovered in 1888, but no one had since analyzed the event. I desperately wanted to know more about the scheme and the man behind it. So, I set out to write about this event, and things spiraled from there.

I began with a deep dive into Astwood’s consular dispatches, which led me to other US State Department records, and then back to the Dominican national archive. In reading these archival sources, I realized that the Columbus bones scheme was not the only controversy involving Astwood. This revelation demanded two separate approaches to my method. First, I needed to find primary documents that provided insight on Astwood’s biography and historical context. Such sources lead me to UK archives, genealogical databases, and New Orleans records, and enabled me to reconstruct Astwood’s world in chapters 1 and 2 of the book. Second, I realized that I had to take a unique approach to my sources, reading primary documents in multiple ways: with the grain, against the grain, as a form of genre, and as instruments of power. For example, in the sixth chapter, “Leasing Columbus” I track a wide array of US, Dominican, and Latin American newspapers as they employed racist and gendered ridicule to shame Astwood. I argue that this display of power sought to reassert a strict racial divide between (white) Americans and (black) Dominicans, and the sacred (Columbus) and the profane (the market).

My interdisciplinary training in Latin American & Caribbean history, African American Studies, and Religious Studies enabled me to read the archival record not only for facts but also for the ways that power flowed through various media like consular dispatches, missionary letters, newspapers, indemnity remittances, and letters of recommendations. As a trickster, Astwood’s manipulated competing understandings of racist moral logic in these sources. He did so purposefully, to assert interpretive authority over facts. I term this process the “moral politics of race-making.” As stated above, I view morality discourse in these archival sources as a currency of power. By carefully tracking how, when, and who used this currency, I was ultimately able to trace how religious concepts of morality were fundamental to racial capitalism and the development of US empire in Santo Domingo.

KK: You make clear in the introduction that your goal was not to provide a full picture of Astwood’s biography. Can you talk about how the limitations of the archive shaped your depiction of Astwood’s life and your understanding of how power functioned in his contemporaneous world? 

CDC: Astwood was a prolific writer and Black thinker. He wrote nearly five hundred dispatches in his seven years as US consul. He also wrote missionary letters, opinion pieces in US newspapers, and pamphlets throughout his life. At one point, he planned to publish an autobiography, although I am unsure whether he reached this goal. After returning to the United States in 1892, Astwood established a newspaper, The Defender, in Philadelphia (few issues exist today). His political career mirrored that of other African American preacher-politicians-editors of his day, and many of them wrote about Astwood. Historians of African American history know much about the world that Astwood and these other Black men inhabited in the United States, and I therefore believe that someone could write a more traditional biography of Astwood. I choose not to do so.

The reason for my choice has less to do with archival limitations, and more to do with my intended historiographical intervention. As scholarship on Black internationalism has grown in recent years, historians have highlighted African Americans’ special ties to Haiti. At the same time, scholars of the Haitian Revolution have also emphasized that this pivotal event and its aftermath affected the whole island, including territory that would later become the Dominican Republic. In Dominican Crossroads, I put Dominican history in conversation with these larger trends by examining African Americans’ relationship to eastern Hispaniola, Black Protestant history on the island, US diplomacy and economic imperialism in Dominican society. I also study how various forms of Christian moral ideology intersected with racial capitalism. As I argue in the book’s introduction, Astwood’s life, and more specifically, his consular career was my “guide.”

This being said, Astwood’s trickster nature meant that I could not take every piece of his writing at face value. It also meant that Astwood operated in liminal spaces—at the borders (or the crossroads) of nations and institutions—meaning that documents regarding Astwood also existed on the edge of larger archives, if they existed at all. It is also the nature of some topics, such as the inner workings of diplomacy, dictatorship, and conspiracy that certain “acts are characterized by [a] shroud of secrecy,” as historian Jaime de Jesús Domínguez has written. In this case, as I argue in chapters 4 and 7, “fiction” or what people think happened is sometimes more important than “fact.” Dominican Crossroads tracks how people like Astwood used moral discourse to navigate and sometimes manipulate the slipperiness between fiction and fact.

KK: Dominican Crossroads is the first in-depth study of US-Dominican relations during the 1880s and the first comprehensive analysis of Black Protestantism in the Dominican Republic. What do you hope that readers learn from your examination of US-Dominican relations through H.C.C. Astwood’s position of authority during the late nineteenth century?

CDC: I hope that readers will walk away with a greater sense of how ideas of morality factored into the construction of race and the production of historical narrative in the late nineteenth century. Dominican Crossroads present several concepts, like “segregated statecraft” (chapter 3) and “white moral exclusivity” (chapter 7), that demonstrate how morality based in western Christianity was a component part of race-making, statecraft, US empire, capitalism, and white supremacy. By tracing how moral discourse operated in various scenarios concerning Astwood, I show how elites in the United States and Latin America justified racial oppression as a spiritual imperative.

Astwood manipulated concepts of morality for his own ends, and his trickery (or tigueraje), I argue, shows how moral discourse operated in the transnational spheres of diplomacy and culture. I hope that readers will see my examination of US-Dominican relations in chapters 3-7 as a method. Through my analysis of moral discourse in these chapters, I can track power dynamics at multiple scales: interpersonal, intranational, and international. Thus, I am also able to see what is not immediately apparent in the texts: the way that race, gender, and concepts of good and evil intertwine. Sometimes, this method enables me to lift the “shroud of secrecy” that surrounds the inner works of statecraft. At the very least, it allows me to understand why rumors of conspiracy existed in the first place.

Beyond this, I hope to build a greater awareness of Dominican history particularly as it relates to African American history and US-Caribbean relations more broadly.

To this end Dominican Crossroads contributes to scholarly discussion of various topics: the relationship between the Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic, and Haiti; the Caribbean anticolonial activist networks of the 1860s-70s; the effects of US Black emigration on Hispaniola; the history of Black Protestant and fraternal networks in New Orleans, Santo Domingo, New York and elsewhere; the impact of US capitalism on Dominican and Haitian politics; and the paradox of African American diplomats working as agents of US empire. I hope that readers will learn about these topics too.

KK: How does your study of African American consuls, Black Protestant clergy, and the Dominican Republic’s place in a racialized geopolitical context during the late nineteenth century contribute to and push the fields of Caribbean, Latin American, U.S., and African American history forward?

CDC: By nature of its sharing the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, the Dominican Republic sat at the intersection of transnational debates over race and Black civic capacity in the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in the 1880s when a dark-skinned man of Haitian descent, Ulises Heureaux, became the country’s president and then dictator. While Santo Domingo was one of many diasporic crossroads of the Americas, the city was exceptional because of this history.

Dominican Crossroads acknowledges the Dominican Republic’s unique historical reality. In early chapters, I document how the United States saw the Dominican Republic not only as Black like Haiti but also diplomatically subordinate to it. The book moreover shows that African Americans had their own ideas about the Dominican Republic based on their unique relationship to Haiti, and it tracks African Americans’ historical ties to eastern Hispaniola. This intervention sets Dominican Crossroads apart from other studies of US-Dominican international relations and US dollar diplomacy. It also contributes to scholarship regarding African Americans’ racial solidarity with Haitians, Cubans, Brazilians, Jamaicans, etc., reinforcing the notion that such ties were sometimes complicated as African Americans partnered with US empire. More than other similar works, I place religion—and more specifically moral discourse—at the center of my analysis, demonstrating that in late nineteenth century the debate over Black civic capacity and Black political authority was a battle for narrative control waged through moral discourse. The power to control historical narrative and thus project one’s own vision of the future was, in short, a battle for the moral upper hand.