Stitching Pathways through the Plantation: Black Practices of Mobility and Belonging in the New World

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

African American Studies

First Advisor

Laguna, Albert

Abstract

This dissertation illuminates the co-constitutive relationship between Black mobility and the plantation complex, arguing that that mobility serves as a central but underexamined framework for understanding Black experience in the New World. Through an analysis of early 20th-century Black intra-Caribbean migration between Jamaica, Panama, Cuba, and Haiti—with particular attention to Black women's routes and experiences—and contemporary Cuban cultural producers, it demonstrates how intra-Caribbean migrations are integral to understanding U.S. empire and hemispheric racial capitalism, challenging traditional migration narratives that focus primarily on North-South or periphery-to-metropole movements. Introducing the concept of the "Black moving presence," the dissertation theorizes Black mobility as an ambivalent strategy that both supports plantation systems and exceeds plantation control, creating alternative pathways for survival, kinship, and belonging across colonial, national, and linguistic borders. Through the framework of "plantation im/mobilities," the study examines the uneven and ambivalent routes shaped by overlapping plantation regimes. Drawing from family oral histories, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores how Black people navigated and exceeded plantation attempts at control through strategic movement across colonial, national, and linguistic borders in the 20th-century Caribbean. Methodologically, the project employs "stitching" as both analytical framework and methodological approach—a Black Caribbean feminist praxis derived from the author's great-grandmother's storytelling about her work as a seamstress. This approach enables examination of fragmented family archives while connecting embodied cultural practices to broader theoretical questions about Blackness, mobility, and belonging in the Americas. Through multilingual analysis across English, Spanish, Haitian Kreyòl, combined with critical performance ethnography and embodied cultural methods, the study reveals how Black people's agricultural and aesthetic production ("agri-culture") constitutes forms of resistance, alternative world-making, and potentials for healing historic and ongoing plantation violence. The first half of the dissertation looks at the 20th century history of intra-Caribbean Black migration. Chapter 1 analyzes archival efforts to “count” and control Black migrants in Eastern Cuba. Chapter 2 theorizes Black migrant women's labor in sustaining community and family through an analysis of family oral history. The second half looks at how contemporary Cuban cultural producers continue this legacy through food-centered artistic practices that engage ancestral lineages and healing work, representing ongoing negotiations with plantation afterlives. Chapter 3 examines Afro-Cuban funk artist Cimafunk and their strategy of “abuela-ismo” (grandmother-centered aesthetics) and the role of food and music as healing and resistance. Chapter 4 explores the work of Grupo ENNEGRO, a Vodú-based agri-cultural art and ecological restoration in Eastern Cuba and how their work is an example of Black indigenization and strategic marronage. This study expands work in Black geographies by centering mobility, critiques Anglophone bias in Black Studies, and connects Caribbean migration history with critical theory, food studies, performance studies, and Black feminist praxis.

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