Tracing Dominican Identity

Tracing Dominican Identity
Author: J. Valdez
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023011721X

The author analyzes and discusses the socio-historical meanings and implications of Pedro Henríquez Ureña's (1884-1946) writings on language. This important twentieth century Latin American intellectual is an unavoidable reference in Hispanic Linguistics and Cultural Studies.

Tracing Dominican Identity

Tracing Dominican Identity
Author: J. Valdez
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2015-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781349292073

The author analyzes and discusses the socio-historical meanings and implications of Pedro Henríquez Ureña's (1884-1946) writings on language. This important twentieth century Latin American intellectual is an unavoidable reference in Hispanic Linguistics and Cultural Studies.

Merengue

Merengue
Author: Paul Austerlitz
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1997-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781566394840

Merengue is a quintessential Dominican dance music. This work aims to unravel the African and Iberian roots of merengue. It examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures.

Unmastering the Script

Unmastering the Script
Author: Sheridan Wigginton
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0817320318

Analyzes textbooks in the Dominican Republic for evidence of reproducing Haitian Otherness Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity examines how school curriculum–based representations of Dominican identity navigate black racial identity, its relatedness to Haiti, and the culturally entrenched pejorative image of the Haitian Other in Dominican society. Wigginton and Middleton analyze how social science textbooks and historical biographies intended for young Dominicans reflect an increasing shift toward a clear and public inclusion of blackness in Dominican identity that serves to renegotiate the country’s long-standing antiblack racial master script. The authors argue that although many of the attempts at this inclusion reflect a lessening of “black denial,” when considered as a whole, the materials often struggle to find a consistent and coherent narrative for the place of blackness within Dominican identity, particularly regarding the ways in which blackness continues to be meaningfully related to the otherness of Haitian racial identity. Unmastering the Script approaches the text materials as an example of “reconstructing” and “unburying” an African past, supporting the uneven, slow, and highly context-specific nature of the process. This work engages with multiple disciplines including history, anthropology, education, and race studies, building on a new wave of Dominican scholarship that considers how contemporary perspectives of Dominican identity both accept the existence of an African past and seek to properly weigh its importance. The use of critical race theory as the framework facilitates unfolding the past political and legal agendas of governing elites in the Dominican Republic and also helps to unlock the nuance of an increasingly black-inclusive Dominican identity. In addition, this framework allows the unveiling of some of the socially damaging effects the Haitian Other master script can have on children, particularly those of Haitian ancestry, in the Dominican Republic.

The Mulatto Republic

The Mulatto Republic
Author: April J. Mayes
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813072581

“Impels the reader to not lean solely on the crutch of Dominican anti-Haitianism in order to understand Dominican identity and state formation. Mayes proves that there was a multitude of factors that sharpen our knowledge of the development of race and nation in the Dominican Republic.”—Millery Polyné, author of From Douglass to Duvalier “A fascinating book. Mayes discusses the roots of anti-Haitianism, the Dominican elite, and the ways in which race and nation have been intertwined in the history of the Dominican Republic. What emerges is a very interesting and engaging social history.”—Kimberly Eison Simmons, author of Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic was once celebrated as a mulatto racial paradise. Now the island nation is idealized as a white, Hispanic nation, having abandoned its many Haitian and black influences. The possible causes of this shift in ideologies between popular expressions of Dominican identity and official nationalism has long been debated by historians, political scientists, and journalists. In The Mulatto Republic, April Mayes looks at the many ways Dominicans define themselves through race, skin color, and culture. She explores significant historical factors and events that have led the nation, for much of the twentieth century, to favor privileged European ancestry and Hispanic cultural norms such as the Spanish language and Catholicism. Mayes seeks to discern whether contemporary Dominican identity is a product of the Trujillo regime—and, therefore, only a legacy of authoritarian rule—or is representative of a nationalism unique to an island divided into two countries long engaged with each other in ways that are sometimes cooperative and at other times conflicted. Her answers enrich and enliven an ongoing debate. Publication of this digital edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Introduction to Dominican Blackness

Introduction to Dominican Blackness
Author: Silvio Torres-Saillant
Publisher:
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2010
Genre: Blacks
ISBN:

This study is a reflection on the complexity of racial thinking and racial discourse in Dominican society.

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation
Author: Franklin Franco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2015-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317665295

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation is the first English translation of the classic text Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana by esteemed Dominican scholar Franklin J. Franco. Published in 1969, this book was the first systematic work on the role of Afro-descendants in Dominican society, the first society of the modern Americas where a Black-Mulatto population majority developed during the 16th century. Franco’s work, a foundational text for Dominican ethnic studies, constituted a paradigm shift, breaking with the distortions of traditional histories that focused on the colonial elite to place Afro-descendants, slavery, and race relations at the center of Dominican history. This translation includes a new introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse University) which contextualizes Franco's work, explaining the milieu in which he was writing, and bringing the historiography of race, slavery, and the Dominican Republic up to the present. Making this pioneering work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this is a must-have for anyone interested in the lasting effects of African slavery on the Dominican population and Caribbean societies.

Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature

Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature
Author: Danny Méndez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136467890

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Migration Studies, Post-Colonial Studies and Affect Theory, Méndez analyzes the symbolic interplay between emotions, cognitions, and displacement in the narratives written by and about Dominican and Dominican-Americans in the United States and Puerto Rico. He argues that given the historic place of creolization as a marker of national, cultural, and social development in the Caribbean and particularly the Dominican Republic, this cultural process is not magically annulled in Caribbean immigrations to the U.S. Instead, this book illustrates the numerous ways in which Dominicans’ subjective interpretation of their experiences of migration and incorporation into U.S. society, seen through the filter of multiple creolizations of the past, are woven into their written works as a series of variations on Americanness and Dominicanness. Through close readings of selected writings by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis González, Junot Díaz, Josefina Báez, Loida Maritza Pérez among others, Méndez argues that emotional creolizations operate as a psychological parameter on immigrant populations as they negotiate their transcultural status against the ideological norms of assimilation in their new host country. Consequently, he proposes that this emotional creolization is dialectical — that is, it not only affects diasporic populations, but also changes the norms and terms of assimilation as well.

Tracing Dominican Identity

Tracing Dominican Identity
Author: J. Valdez
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2011-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023011721X

The author analyzes and discusses the socio-historical meanings and implications of Pedro Henríquez Ureña's (1884-1946) writings on language. This important twentieth century Latin American intellectual is an unavoidable reference in Hispanic Linguistics and Cultural Studies.

We Dream Together

We Dream Together
Author: Anne Eller
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822373769

In We Dream Together Anne Eller breaks with dominant narratives of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti by tracing the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865. Eller moves beyond the small body of writing by Dominican elites that often narrates Dominican nationhood to craft inclusive, popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance was anchored in a rich and complex political culture. Haitians and Dominicans fostered a common commitment to Caribbean freedom, the abolition of slavery, and popular democracy, often well beyond the reach of the state. By showing how the island's political roots are deeply entwined, and by contextualizing this history within the wider Atlantic world, Eller demonstrates the centrality of Dominican anticolonial struggles for understanding independence and emancipation throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.