On March 5, Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel delivered a lecture titled “Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico.” The event, held in the John B. Davis Lecture Hall, also served as a tribute to Macalester History Professor Emeritus Jim Stewart.
“A towering figure in the academic community,” his obituary describes, “Dr. Stewart left an indelible mark through his scholarship, teaching, and unwavering commitment to equity and justice.”
Stewart, who passed in 2025, spent more than four decades at Macalester teaching American history with a focus on enslavement and abolition. During his career, he chaired the history department, served as Dean of Faculty and Provost and helped establish the college’s Latin American Studies program. Speakers at the event described Stewart as someone who believed the study of history should not only examine the past, but support justice in the present.
Professor Ernesto Capello described his first encounter with Stewart in 2008: “He still stopped by the history department to see how things were going, and when he learned who I was, this enormous smile just lit up his entire face. His eyes and the spark within them were something I came to know over the next several decades. He exclaimed, ‘You’re the new Latin American studies professor!’ and pulled me into the hallway and wouldn’t let me go until I told him all about my research.”
Beyond campus, Stewart founded the scholar organization Historians Against Slavery and created the 16-part YouTube lecture series, “Historical Tonic for Fragile White Folks.”
The themes of Stewart’s abolitionist and anti-colonial work resonated with Corniel’s lecture, which focused on uncovering overlooked stories of enslaved and free Black people in the Spanish Caribbean. Corniel, an assistant professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, researches colonial records from Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic.
Her essay collection, “Transatlantic Bondage,” is composed of both her and others’ scholarship. It grew out of an effort to document the experiences of Black Africans in Spain and its colonies. According to Corniel, U.S. scholarship has often overlooked these histories, despite extensive archival material preserved in Spanish records.
“‘Transatlantic Bondage’ was born out of the need to fill a tremendous, and I cannot emphasize that enough, a tremendous gap in U.S. scholarship,” Corniel said. “I specify U.S. scholarship because a lot has been written about slavery in San Domingo, by Dominican scholars, or by multilingual scholars interested in the topic.”
Much of Corniel’s research involves working through colonial documents written in difficult early-modern Spanish handwriting. The process can require hours of careful transcription and translation.
One story she highlighted was that of Elena, an enslaved woman in 18th-century Santo Domingo. According to records, Elena repeatedly escaped from her enslaver’s home to travel on foot to another town, more than forty miles away, to live with a different owner, who she liked more. She made the trip every other night.
When Elena was eventually sold to another enslaver, the bill of sale contained a complaint. Her new owner wanted to return her, because he found out that she loved to dance.
The control of joy and autonomy connects to another note Corniel found in the archives that she calls “Soul Prison.” A colonial law in Santo Domingo stated, “We prohibit under the most severe penalties, the nightly clandestine occurrences that usually take place in the homes of those who pass away and their relatives to pray and sing in their language and to perform the dances which they call Bancos, in memory and honor of the person who passed away calling for a transmigration of their soul to their beloved homeland, which, for them, is the most delicious paradise: Africa.”
The law sought to prevent the soul itself from returning to Africa after the individual’s passing.
“You already control their body, their world, their mind, their space,” Corniel said. “You want to grab their soul?”
According to Corniel, stories such as these add depth and nuance to our understanding of the lives of enslaved people in Santo Domingo. Previous scholarship has overlooked lived experiences in favor of economic histories.
“Scholars of colonial slavery and the Caribbean became more interested in following the sugar, because the sugar industry dwindled in Santo Domingo after the 1560s,” she explained. “They decided to focus on the wealth that the enslaved people were producing. But what about the people? What about how they were living every day? …. Sugar should not have been the main focus of [scholarship about] slavery from the beginning. It should have been a focus to write, read and research about the people.”
The lecture resonated with audience members.
“One thing [Corniel] highlighted is that this isn’t something that a lot of historians have researched,” Ainsley Meyer ’26 said. “I wouldn’t know about those stories of those women if she hadn’t done the work to discover them.”
Find Corniel’s book at SUNY Press’ website. Macalester students can reach out to the history department for a 30 percent discount.
