Dividing Hispaniola

Dividing Hispaniola
Author: Edward Paulino
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822981033

The island of Hispaniola is split by a border that divides the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This border has been historically contested and largely porous. Dividing Hispaniola is a study of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's scheme, during the mid-twentieth century, to create and reinforce a buffer zone on this border through the establishment of state institutions and an ideological campaign against what was considered an encroaching black, inferior, and bellicose Haitian state. The success of this program relied on convincing Dominicans that regardless of their actual color, whiteness was synonymous with Dominican cultural identity. Paulino examines the campaign against Haiti as the construct of a fractured urban intellectual minority, bolstered by international politics and U.S. imperialism. This minority included a diverse set of individuals and institutions that employed anti-Haitian rhetoric for their own benefit (i.e., sugar manufacturers and border officials.) Yet, in reality, these same actors had no interest in establishing an impermeable border. Paulino further demonstrates that Dominican attitudes of admiration and solidarity toward Haitians as well as extensive intermixture around the border region were commonplace. In sum his study argues against the notion that anti-Haitianism was part of a persistent and innate Dominican ethos.

Hispaniola

Hispaniola
Author: Samuel M. Wilson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 1990-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817304622

Hispaniola examines the early years of the contact period in the Caribbean and in narrative form reconstructs the social and political organization of the Ta&iactue;no.

Transnational Hispaniola

Transnational Hispaniola
Author: April J. Mayes
Publisher: University of Florida Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781683402688

In addition to sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a complicated and at times painful history. Yet Transnational Hispaniola shows that there is much more to the two nations' relationship than their perceived antagonism. Rejecting dominant narratives that reinforce opposition between the two sides of the island, contributors to this volume highlight the connections and commonalities that extend across the border, mapping new directions in Haitianist and Dominicanist scholarship.Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, political economy, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. From a moving section on passport petitions that reveals the familial, friendship, and communal networks across Hispaniola in the nineteenth century to a discussion of the shared music traditions that unite the island today, this volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways.Complete with reflections and advice on teaching a transnational approach to Haitian and Dominican studies, this agenda-setting volume argues that the island of Hispaniola and its inhabitants should be studied in a way that contextualizes differences, historicizes borders, and recognizes cross-island links.Contributors: Paul Austerlitz | Nathalie Bragadir | Raj Chetty | Anne Eller | Kaiama L. Glover | Maja Horn | Regine Jean-Charles | Kiran C. Jayaram | Elizabeth Manley | April Mayes | Elizabeth Russ | Fidel J. Tavárez | Elena ValdezPublication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Why the Cocks Fight

Why the Cocks Fight
Author: Michele Wucker
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466867884

Like two roosters in a fighting arena, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are encircled by barriers of geography and poverty. They co-inhabit the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, but their histories are as deeply divided as their cultures: one French-speaking and black, one Spanish-speaking and mulatto. Yet, despite their antagonism, the two countries share a national symbol in the rooster--and a fundamental activity and favorite sport in the cockfight. In this book, Michele Wucker asks: "If the symbols that dominate a culture accurately express a nation's character, what kind of a country draws so heavily on images of cockfighting and roosters, birds bred to be aggressive? What does it mean when not one but two countries that are neighbors choose these symbols? Why do the cocks fight, and why do humans watch and glorify them?" Wucker studies the cockfight ritual in considerable detail, focusing as much on the customs and histories of these two nations as on their contemporary lifestyles and politics. Her well-cited and comprehensive volume also explores the relations of each nation toward the United States, which twice invaded both Haiti (in 1915 and 1994) and the Dominican Republic (in 1916 and 1965) during the twentieth century. Just as the owners of gamecocks contrive battles between their birds as a way of playing out human conflicts, Wucker argues, Haitian and Dominican leaders often stir up nationalist disputes and exaggerate their cultural and racial differences as a way of deflecting other kinds of turmoil. Thus Why the Cocks Fight highlights the factors in Caribbean history that still affect Hispaniola today, including the often contradictory policies of the U.S.

The Imagined Island

The Imagined Island
Author: Pedro L. San Miguel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2006-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807876992

In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers. Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial, ethnic, and national identity on the island. He finds that Haiti was often portrayed by Dominicans as "the other--first as a utopian slave society, then as a barbaric state and enemy to the Dominican Republic. Although most of the Dominican population is mulatto and black, Dominican citizens tended to emphasize their Spanish (white) roots, essentially silencing the political voice of the Dominican majority, San Miguel argues. This pioneering work in Caribbean and Latin American historiography, originally published in Puerto Rico in 1997, is now available in English for the first time.

Hispaniola - Hell Or Home?

Hispaniola - Hell Or Home?
Author: Pauline M. Kulstad-González
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre:
ISBN: 9789088908514

This work attempts to examine the lifeways at Concepción de la Vega archaeological site dur-ing its occupation from 1494 through 1564, using a Decolonial approach. Situated in present-day Dominican Republic (Hispaniola island), this site was one of the earliest and most afflu-ent Caribbean colonial history.

Islanders and Empire

Islanders and Empire
Author: Juan José Ponce Vázquez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108801366

Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region.

Haiti & the Dominican Republic

Haiti & the Dominican Republic
Author: Ross Velton
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1999
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781898323822

Together Haiti and the Dominican Republic fo rm the island of Hispaniola. With easy cross border travel, this guide is aimed at both the independent traveller and th e adventurous package tourist, providing all the necessary p ractical information. '

Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint

Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint
Author: E. Matibag
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2003-05-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1403973806

What would the island of Hispaniola look like if viewed as a loosely connected system? That is the question Haitian-Dominican Counterpointseeks to answer as it surveys the insular space shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their parallel histories. For beneath the familiar tale of hostilities, the systemic perspective reveals a lesser-known, "unitarian" narrative of interdependencies and reciprocal influences shaping each country'sidentity. In view of the sociocultural and economic linkages connecting the two countries, their relations would have to resemble not so much acockfight (the conventional metaphor) as a serial and polyrhythmic counterpoint.