If the Civil War had changed policy makers’ attitudes to black resettlement, it was to divide them into supporters of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of the idea. By 1865, the Blairs had come out for the latter – and for the Democratic Party that embodied it. But the Republicans struggled to break from old ways of thinking. When President Ulysses Grant proposed annexing the Dominican Republic as a potential destination for African Americans, but as a fully fledged state of the American Union, his colleagues divided over whether his proposal was radical or reactionary. Meanwhile, in the southern United States, waves of white oppression in the 1870s and 1890s drove African Americans toward the offer of an ACS that, lacking the financial support of times past, struggled to meet demand. As the United States filled with settlers of European descent, and as the great imperialist land-grab left ever fewer foreign locations for African American resettlement, the proto-segregation represented by black colonization morphed into the local segregation with which modern Americans are more familiar.

This analytical survey of key texts in contemporary urban Caribbean fiction and poetry from Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Santo Domingo and Pointe-à-Pitre explores several themes this literature holds in common: the postcolonial (or, in the case of Cuba, post-revolutionary) breakdown of the urban fabric and its attendant covert and more often overt violence, seen here in relation to the haunting and haunted after-lives of the plantation complex, along with the lived textures of daily life, with its unstable interplay of social anomie and possible emancipatory alternatives.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the multiple transformationsthe island went through with the rise and fall of the colonial economy in the sixteenth century, as it cycled through gold extraction, and then the expansion of African slavery with the establishment of sugar plantations, all the while exploiting indigenous labor. After the decline of the sugar economy, ginger and cattle ranching followed as the most important economic activities in the last two decades of the century. The chapter ends with a description of the city of Santo Domingo as the social and political center of the colony.