Dutch Oil, Dominican Sugar and the Back Doors of the Caribbean Diaspora, 1910-1970

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Margo Groenewoud in Conversation with Chelsea Schields.
 
Event organized in collaboration with CUNY’s Dominican Studies Institute and the CUNY Graduate Center History Program.
 
Friday, March 24, 2023, 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM EDT
Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Room C-198 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016
 
This event is free and open to the public. Get ticket to RSVP here.
 
The development of the oil industries on the Dutch Caribbean islands Curaçao (1918) and Aruba (1928) and the booming sugar industries in the Dominican Republic during the American occupation (1916-1924) triggered a heightened interaction between the islands that would last for decades. The initial intensification involved labor migration from the English and Papiamentu-speaking Dutch islands to the sugar factories of San Pedro the Macoris, and a steady stream of temporary sex workers from the Dominican Republic into the Dutch and Dutch-American oil towns of Curaçao and Aruba.
 
Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Margo Groenewoud (CUNY Dominican Studies Institute & University of Curaçao) studied the intensified interactions between the Dutch Caribbean and the Dominican Republic in times of occupations, Garveyism, dictatorship and the cold war. In this presentation she shares provisional findings that shed new light on policing and registration, and how this affected agency, belonging and citizenship of so far understudied and invisible groups within the Black diaspora.
The presentation is followed by a conversation led by CUNY Graduate School alumnus Dr. Chelsea Schields (University of California, Irvine). Her book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean will be published by University of California Press in May 2023.
 
More about the speakers:
Margo Groenewoud is 2022-2023 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at The City College of New York and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Based in the Dutch Caribbean since 2008, she obtained her PhD degree in Caribbean history at Leiden University and the University of Curaçao, where she is a senior lecturer. Recurrent themes in her scholarship are social exclusion, citizenship, migration and radicalism in the transnational Caribbean. Groenewoud recently published in Clio. Women Gender History, Small Axe and the Journal of Caribbean History. She is consultant for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and member of the editorial boards of CSA’s Caribbean Conjunctures and of the Brill Caribbean Studies series.
Chelsea Schields is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Her scholarship explores the entwined histories of sexuality, energy, and empire in the twentieth-century Caribbean and Europe. She is the author of Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023) and, with Dagmar Herzog, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2021). Recent articles have appeared in Radical History Review and Gender & History.
 
Image credits: Mural in San Pedro de Macoris by artist Nadal Walcot. Courtesy of Margo Groenewoud.
 
Weekday visitors to the Graduate Center’s 365 Fifth Avenue campus no longer have to show proof of vaccination or negative PCR tests at the lobby desk. They just need to show a government-issued picture ID and sign in at the security desk. To enter the Graduate Center, CUNY students, faculty, and staff are required to provide proof of their COVID-19 vaccination through the Cleared4 platform.
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