Fall 2022: getting started!

‘Unholy Alliances’ is the short title of a research project that will result in a book, several smaller publications, a Digital Humanities platform, an Oral History collection and a series of lectures and presentations. I developed the project narrative in the fall of 2021 after an initial inventory of archival material in the Dutch Caribbean, the Netherlands, the Dominican Republic and the United States. This resulted in a Project Narrative that I used for applying for funding and finding support.

How to get started with a project like this?
Doing research comes down to finding time and money, getting things organized and creating support systems and partnerships. As a researcher, not only do I depend on the cooperation of many people and organizations, I also want this to be a learning opportunity for students and anyone interested in sharing and learning relative to this topic. Being a transnational project with great opportunities to synergize digitally with other scholars and repositiories, this project is both a traditional historical research project as well as a Digital Humanities project.

In April 2022 I received the news that I was awarded a DSI Research Fellowship, a monetary grant from the Dominican Studies Institute for which I will write a Research Monograph on Dutch-Dominican Engagements in a Broader Atlantic Perspective. This monograph is an introduction to twentieth century Dutch-Dominican engagements, and an important building block for the Unholy Alliances research project at large. More good news followed in May 2022, when I learned that I was selected for the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence program, for which I applied together with The City College New York (CCNY) Colin Powell School for Civic And Global Leadership and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

Now I really needed to get organized and get things moving! Before leaving for the US at the end of August, my priority was to get the Oral History organization ready to roll. I recruited two multilingual research-assistants, both UoC students, set up our ‘Oral History Squad’ and started doing a first set of five interviews with Dominican migrants in Curaçao. Also, I connected with long-standing friends and DH-partners at Radboud University and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, dLOC, to start thinking about collaborating in building a Historical Migration Database.

In September 2022 I started my scholarship year at The City College of New York (CCNY). This is the oldest New York college, now one of 25 colleges withing the City of New York school system, CUNY. The college is located in the heart of Harlem. This location may not have much to do with my research on first sight, but that is not the case. Labor migrants from the Dutch Caribbean working as temporary laborers in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1920s and 1930s got involved in social activism and movements such as Garveys UNIA. Some of these ended up in New York, where they intermingled with other Caribbean migrants most of whom lived in Harlem. These important ‘micro histories’ are part of my research.

In the past six weeks I started to find my way around in the libraries and archives now at my disposal. Most impressive so far is making use of the iconic Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Here I found some material that may shed new light on the intellectual development of the Curaçaoan activist Pedro Pablo Medardo de Marchena (1899-1968), about which I will publish hopefully soon. Next on my list is a visit to the Tamiment Library & Wagner Labor Archives, home of the Hermina Huiswoud Papers, and work together with some partners in DH, such as Dr. Coen van Galen of Radboud University who will visit in November. Stay tuned!