AN ALTERNATIVE DIASPORA: AFRICAN AMERICAN ‘OUT’ MIGRATION TO TRINIDAD AND THE BRITIH WEST INDIES, 1783-1865

Abstract

The American Revolution generated tens of thousands of black loyalists who were evacuated from the United States and resettled in London, Nova Scotia, and eventually Sierra Leone. The departure of black loyalists after the Revolutionary era foreground an early form of territorial separatism that occupied a space between discourses of colonization and emigrationism. The dissertation aims to connect the migration of American blacks from the United States after the American Revolution and War of 1812 to discussions of diasporic identity and resettlement in the British Caribbean in the years preceding British colonial emancipation and the years immediately following, in order to connect the conditions under which a pattern of migration was continued. In turn, the dissertation utilizes a multifaceted approach to transnational migration that explores how American black migrants were drawn to the British island colony of Trinidad, and examine how they participated in a process of resettlement.