Congratulations to Dominique! This is a meaningful accomplishment and we are so proud that she is a member of our program.
Dominique's work focuses on Black diasporic history and culture. Drawing on her own cultural grounding within the African diaspora, she examines the intellectual and political continuities between historical and contemporary return-to-Africa movements. Her research centers on the intersections of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, with particular attention to how Black diasporic subjects negotiate belonging, heritage, and resistance through migration and art.
Her current project traces a genealogy of diasporic return through an examination of Paul Cuffe, the son of an enslaved man from the Ashanti region of present-day Ghana, who financed and organized a return voyage of free Black Americans to Sierra Leone in 1815. Reading Cuffe’s efforts as an early articulation of return as both political resistance and ontological reorientation, the project situates his work within a broader history that includes the American Colonization Society, Garveyism, and twentieth-century repatriation movements.
Through an analysis of this history alongside contemporary initiatives such as Ghana’s Year of Return (2019), the project argues that while earlier return movements enacted worldmaking as resistance to racial domination, present-day campaigns are largely structured by neoliberal state logics, revealing a transformation in the political and cultural meanings of return.
As an Eighteenth-Century Africa Publication Fellow Dominique will receive virtual publishing mentorship by both American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and African Studies Association (ASA) journal editors to develop this project for presentation at the ASA annual meeting December 3-6 in New Orleans, LA, and publication in January 2027. The fellowship also includes ASECS membership & meeting registration, ASECS Graduate Student and Early Career Caucus membership, ASA membership & meeting registration, ASA Emerging Scholars Network membership, and travel support for ASA’s annual meeting.
We are so excited to see how her work develops!