Maja Horn. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.

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Transnational Romances and Sex Tourism in Chochueca’s Strategy, by Rita Indiana Hernández; “Emoticons,” by Aurora Arias; and “Heading South,” by Dany Laferrière

Elena Valdez analyzes transactional, heterosexual romance as an allegory of national and transnational formations in her chapter on contemporary Dominican literature and Haitian literature. Rita Indiana, Aurora Arias, and Dany Laferrière write about sex-worker protagonists who, Valdez argues, find inclusion within the nation through the sexual economy provided by tourism. These works explore sex tourism and representations thereof, along with gender relations.

Archives of Afro-Affirmation

Raj Chetty demonstrates that in the period following General Rafael Trujillo's assassination in 1961, literary and cultural journals published works that evidenced engagement with an African diaspora worldview decades before the massive wave of migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States. These works of twentieth-century Dominican literature engage with ideas of Dominican blackness and Dominican negritude against the backdrop of the Dominican Civil War.

“The Tam-Tam of Drums from the West”

Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking about Dominican national identity; Russ shows that Cartagena eventually breaks loose from the discursive structures that define Dominican nationalism in twentieth-century Dominican literature and twentieth-century Dominican poetry as fundamentally anti-black and anti-Haitian.