To Cap-Haïtien, with My Family

Chapter 3 is a collection of passport petitions from the Dominican Republic that open a window into the history of familial, friendship, and communal networks that bound island populations together and explore mobility in the country.

The Contested State

Chapter 2 argues that the Dominican Republic’s separation from Haitian rule in 1844 reflected competing and conflicting notions about nationhood, belonging, and the legacies of Haitian rule over the island of Hispaniola.

Epilogue

The epilogue summarizes the overall arguments presented in the edited volume. It assesses the relationship between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the ecology of Hispaniola, occidentalism, and issues of liberation and sovereignty.

Global Capital Disguised as Sustainability in Post-Earthquake Haiti

This chapter offers a staggering critique of post-earthquake development plans in Haiti. In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, Haiti became an example of disaster capitalism in action. Kiran Jayaram argues that the idea of sustainability, as in new plans for mango production, has been co-opted, becoming code for the continuation of exploitative economic policies within the political economy.

Developing an Economy of Sex

This chapter connects the social and economic history of tourism in the Dominican Republic and Haiti with its impact on masculinity, gender identity, and heterosexual performance. Elizabeth Manley's analysis builds on recent research in anthropology that views sex work as contributing substantially to conflicts of gender relations and changing gender norms. Manley analyzes how these relate to the political economy and development.

Interview with Paul Austerlitz

This chapter tells the story of roots music in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and also examines the shared traditions that unite music across Hispaniola. Paul Austerlitz uses ethnomusicology to argue that music performance, dance (such as merengue), and ritual remain liberatory practices, connected to a history of spirituality and resistance that began in maroon communities during the island’s early history.

Ties That Bind

April Mayes argues that the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court's decision to strip citizenship and nationality from thousands of Dominicans, most of whom are of Haitian ancestry, demonstrates how factions within, and powerbrokers aligned with, the Partido de la Liberación Dominicano (Dominican Liberation Party, PLD) have used anti-Haitianism and other human rights abuses to consolidate its power over the past two decades. During the PLD's administration, anti-black exclusion, Mayes insists, became institutionalized within the bureaucratic mechanisms of the state, complementing and assisting the state’s governance model.

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.