Disruptive Silences: The AME Church and Dominican-Haitian Relations

Abstract

Abstract Often recognized for its advocacy on behalf of African descendants, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has been silent on issues regarding anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. By tracing the historical connection between Black America and Haiti in the nineteenth century and recounting the twentieth-century history of the AME Church in the Dominican Republic, this article explains how an institution created in defense of racial equality could inadvertently facilitate its own silencing. Using archival research, ethnography, and interviews, this article critically analyzes narratives that distance Dominican African Methodists from African Americans and Haitians. It argues that such silences in the AME Church are the result of the church's social marginalization in the Dominican Republic, African American leaders' habitual neglect of the AME Church's Dominican branches, and the assimilation of Black Anglophone migrants into Dominican culture.