Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic PDF Download

Author: Kimberly Eison Simmons
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813041858
Category : Blacks
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This book explores the socio-cultural shifts in the Dominican Republic's racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry as they unbury the African past.

Author: Kimberly Eison Simmons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In Latin America and the Caribbean, racial issues are extremely complex and fluid, particularly the nature of 'blackness.' What it means to be called black is still very different for an African American living in the United States than it is for an individual in the Dominican Republic with an African ancestry. Racial categories were far from concrete as the Dominican populace grew, altered, and solidified around the present notions of identity. Kimberly Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominicans' racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry. Simmons also examines the movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio are challenged, debated, and called into question. How and why Dominicans define their racial identities reveal shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, and proves intrinsic to understanding identities in the African diaspora.

Author: April J. Mayes
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
“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.

Author: Lorgia García Peña
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In The Borders of Dominicanidad Lorgia García-Peña explores the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation's borders. García-Peña constructs a genealogy of dominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and Dominicans living abroad have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects. Centering the role of U.S. imperialism in drawing racial borders between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, she analyzes musical, visual, artistic, and literary representations of foundational moments in the history of the Dominican Republic: the murder of three girls and their father in 1822; the criminalization of Afro-religious practice during the U.S. occupation between 1916 and 1924; the massacre of more than 20,000 people on the Dominican-Haitian border in 1937; and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. García-Peña also considers the contemporary emergence of a broader Dominican consciousness among artists and intellectuals that offers alternative perspectives to questions of identity as well as the means to make audible the voices of long-silenced Dominicans.

Author: Sheridan Wigginton
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320318
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
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.

Author: Franklin J. Franco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317665287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
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.

Author: Robin D.G. Kelley
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807009784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Author: Robert L. Adams Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317850459
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This volume considers the African Diaspora through the underexplored Afro-Latino experience in the Caribbean and South America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches such as feminism and Atlantic studies, the authors explore the production of historical and contemporary identities and cultural practices within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America illustrates how far the fields of Afro-Latino and African Diaspora studies have advanced beyond the Herskovits and Frazier debates of the 1940s. The book’s arguments complicate Herskovits’ insistence on Black culture being an exclusive reflection of African survivals, as well as Frazier’s counter-claim of African American culture being a result of slavery and colonialism. This collection of thought-provoking essays extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Latinos are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora.

Author: Trent Masiki
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469675285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States. This book opens the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature, encouraging greater intercultural solidarities between Latinos and African Americans in the era of Black Lives Matter.

Author: Bernd Reiter
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 162895163X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.