The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.