Untangling Dominican Patriotism

This chapter focuses on the ambivalent nationalism evident in the celebration of the first national Dominican poet, Salomé Ureña (1850-1897). Studying poems, letters, speeches, and essays by Ureña and some of her contemporaries, the chapter contends that the strong desire for Ureña’s poetry coexisted with the elite’s generalized assumption that the ideal citizen subject was a white man. It argues that Ureña’s embodiment of Dominican nonwhiteness combined with her status as a respectable woman allowed Dominicans of the intellectual and ruling elite to satisfy two intertwined impulses: to construct a national identity that could explain Dominican difference from Haiti, and, as such, justify a seat at the global table; and a tacit acceptance that a nonwhite woman such as Ureña could only be considered “the muse of the nation” because Dominican territory had a history of black freedom and leadership.

Conclusion

This epilogue offers a brief synopsis of each previous chapter and the overall arguments of the book. It also ponders how subaltern subjects, before the democratization of who can record and disseminate their worldview, refused or in some way manipulated the interpellating, imperial gaze. Though most of the book is concerned with how Dominican subjects negotiate being ghosted from various Western imaginaries, the epilogue considers the power of not being legible and not being recorded for posterity. It considers a short film and a photograph to muse on the difference between being recognized as a full human and as a citizen subject with full rights and being surveilled and quantified. I argue that the short film—which advertises a designer brand— and a rare 1904 photograph of a young Dominican girl, show a third space in which subaltern subjects were recorded as they refused the label of Otherness.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the book’s claims, including the main contention that dominant Western discourses ghosted the Dominican Republic despite its central place in the colonial architecture of the Americas. Because the chapters focus on how Dominicans negotiated this large-scale ghosting from the late nineteenth century onwards, the introduction describes the free black subjectivity that predominated during the centuries prior. The other sections of the introduction define “ghosting” against other terms such as erasure, silencing, trauma, or even haunting; the gendered dimensions of the forms of black freedom that predominated in the territory; and the gendered and classed dimensions of the shift from this historical singularity to the present day commonplaceness when the Dominican Republic is another Caribbean nation embroiled in a neoliberal world order and with a vast emigrant population living in places such as the U.S. and Europe.

Following the Admiral

This chapter examines how European colonialism, U.S. empire, and Dominican patriarchal nationalism intersected over a century to create the Columbus Lighthouse Memorial in Santo Domingo. These entities, however, cannot account for subaltern subjects’ relationships to monuments such as the Lighthouse and the history that they celebrate. To get at this “history from below,” the chapter analyzes Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Dominican-American film La Soga, and the controversy surrounding the 1985 murder of pop merengue icon Tony Seval in police custody. Juxtaposing these narratives, I contend that working-class island and diasporic Dominican men, most of them nonwhite, resist the persistent nationalist and imperialist violence that the Lighthouse celebrates through the performance of a distinctly Dominican hyper-masculine performance known locally as tigueraje. While resistant to Eurocentric patriarchal history, these performances remain masculinist and prioritize the enactment of violence on non-compliant subjects, including women and queer subjects.

Race, Gender, and Propriety in Dominican Commemoration

This chapter argues that Salomé Ureña’s canonization through the twentieth century required various forms of ghosting. The first half of the chapter traces her commemoration in sculpture, imagery, and biography to show how her celebration as a national icon relied both on her phenotypical whitening and on the elision of some of the strongest desires expressed in her work. The second half of the chapter examines writings about Ureña by two twenty-first century feminist and diasporic Dominican women writers, Julia Alvarez and Chiqui Vicioso. Through close reading analysis and a black diasporic feminist lens, the chapter proposes that feminist and critical race theories, the increase in Dominican literacy rates, and the growth of a diasporic Dominican community with a different vocabulary of race allow Alvarez’s and Vicioso’s recuperative texts to compete with other dominant narratives. Their portrayals model narratives of belonging in which women and nonwhite subjects can be legible as full subjects with myriad desires.

Working Women and the Neoliberal Gaze

This chapter analyzes cultural representations of what Amalia Cabezas calls a transnational “economy of desire” as an important vehicle of socio-economic mobility for working-class Dominican women. Studying the photo series and personal account of a U.S. sex tourist, a short story by Dominican writer Aurora Arias, sex worker testimonies, and several recent films, the chapter enumerates the limits of nonwhite Dominican women’s engagements with, and manipulations of, this uneven transnational economy and questions the optimism behind individual and business philanthropy that takes for granted the larger world order, assuming equal access to global citizenship acquired and consolidated through consumer choices. This chapter proposes that what had been a unique territory within the Americas had become another “third world” island-nation providing cheap labor, sun, sex, and sand through the major socio-political and demographic shifts of the twentieth century, including the consolidation of the Dominican nation-state, U.S. imperialism, and transnational neoliberal policies.

Dominican Women’s Refracted African Diasporas

This chapter engages the creative and anti-hegemonic apertures that become possible from a diasporic space and imaginary by analyzing the cultural expressions, including literature, music, and performance, of several diasporic Dominican women. Building on black diasporic feminist theory, the chapter explores how diasporic Dominicans engage with, adopt, or refuse definitions of blackness as they predominate in the U.S. through the writings of Chiqui Vicioso and the performances of musical artists Amara la Negra and Maluca Mala. Because they all resist to some extent the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies that govern dominant paradigms throughout the hemisphere, the chapter locates improper behavior as the primary vehicle in which these artists invert and/or refuse the gendered, classed, and raced scripts expected from Dominican women. Together, these diasporic subjects (in the sense of the Dominican and the African diaspora) evince the prismatic nature of the African Diaspora.