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•February 2006•p 180–188•ISSN 0799-0537

Blackness and Meaningin Studying Hispaniola:

A Review Essay

Silvio Torres-Saillant

Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, Race, and State on Hispaniola,

Eugenio Matibag. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN: 0-312-29432-8

Te Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic,

Dawn F. Stinchcomb. Gaines-ville: University Press of Florida, 2004. ISBN: 0-8130-2699-7

Eugenio Matibag’s

Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, Race, and State on Hispan-iola

and Dawn F. Stinchcomb’s

Te Development of Literary Blackness in the DominicanRepublic

participate meaningfully in the scholarly conversation about the meaning of race, nation, and cultural identity in Dominican society, with particular attention to itsrapport with neighboring Haiti. Te two studies do well what they set out to do, thusearning a place of notice within a growing academic bibliography on this subject. Mati-bag, associate professor of Spanish at Iowa State University, and Stinchcomb, assistantprofessor of foreign languages and literatures at Purdue University, examine questionssimilar to those explored in recent years in other studies coming from various otherdisciplines. Salient among these are

Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1999) by journalist Michele Wucker;

Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2000) by political scientist Ernesto Sagás;

Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic

(Oxford and Boulder: Signal Books and Lynne Rienner Publishers,

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2001) by geographer David J. Howard; and

Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans

(New York: LFB Scholarly Publishers, 2002) by linguistBenjamin H. Bailey.One may assess the contributions made by Matibag and Stinchcomb in light of the discursive conventions that have prevailed in the bibliography on the question of race among Dominicans. A distinguishing feature of the conventional wisdom on thissubject is a tendency to pass judgment on the Dominican population’s “backwardness,”“ignorance,” or “confusion” on account of their inaccurate self-deﬁnition. Te following words said nearly three decades ago by Leslie B. Rout, Jr., encapsulate the tone and thetenor of the typical formulation: “A mulatto nation situated in the Negroid Caribbean isundoubtedly ailing if it cannot accept its racial image. ... the gloriﬁcation of Caucasianfeatures by the mulatto majority is disturbing and, for the black majority, psychologi-cally disjunctive.”¹More indictment than analysis, Rout’s view dates from a time whenscholars could regard racial identity as a stable ascription unproblematically linked to abiological reality. Scholars today for the most part describe race as a social construction.Even so, commentators on the race question in Dominican society persist in suggesting

that Dominicans get it wrong when they speak of themselves racially, implying that some

constructions are more accurate than others.Fraught with the avatars of the discursive conventions embraced by Rout, studiesthat attend to racial dynamics in Dominican society will construe the community underperusal as racially anomalous. Tat interpretation, I contend, can hold only if one omitsthe racial exegeses of Dominicans themselves and if one overlooks alternative narrativesthat would place Dominicans at the forefront of the struggle for black liberation in themodern world. Te proponents of that interpretation pay insuﬃ cient attention to thepreeminence of Santo Domingo as the inaugural stage for the ﬁrst discernable fruits of

the cultural and political legacy of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.

Tey overstate the signiﬁcance of Haiti in the tribulations of Dominican blackness andfalsely portray the country’s oﬃ cial cultural commissars as uniquely negative in theirrepresentations of Haitians. Tey exaggerate the exceptionality of Negrophobia in theethno-racial constructions of the Dominican nation. Tey pathologize the racial mis-conduct discernible in given chapters of Dominican history, often imputing to the entireDominican population the words and deeds of the country’s rulers and the intellectual

1. Leslie B. Rout, Jr.,

Te African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day

(Cambridge, UK:ambridge University Press, 1976), 288.

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•Blackness and Meaning in Studying Hispaniola

elites who serve as their scribes. Teir failure to consider the Dominican case in a com-

parative perspective leads to their unnecessary befuddlement. Te regional context wouldat least reveal that societies throughout the hemisphere came into being as a result of racial

crime. Genocide was the basis of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. When,in the republican period, modern Creole nations emerged, the political leadership hadat their disposal only the racial thought and the idea of progress that the former colonialregime bequeathed to them. Seldom did the new leaders distance themselves from the

racial crimes of the preceding social order. As I have insisted elsewhere, “Te intelligentsia

created the conceptual paradigms that facilitated the crimes. Tey provided definitionsof national identity that rendered specific ethnically differentiated subsections of theexisting population of the region inimical to the very constitution of the nation,” thusgiving “respectability to racial oppression and ethnic exclusion.”²Te disempowermentof racial minorities in the United States and Latin America today is a direct result of theoppression involved in the act of building nations throughout the hemisphere.Te tale of Dominican blackness contains the elements of a bad story, dominated by the theme of Negrophobia, and a good story, consisting of a narrative of events that show Santo Domingo setting the pattern of the struggle for freedom and racial equality in the

Americas. Santo Domingo ushered in the tradition of

marronage

, as enslaved blacks there

first escaped the colonial regime in 1503, only one year after their arrival in the ship thatbrought Fray Nicolás de Ovando as governor of the island. Te hemisphere’s first black slave insurrection took place there on the plantation owned by none other than Gover-nor Diego Colón, on 27 December 1522. Tere too flourished the campaigns of severalsixteenth-century maroon communities, including those led by Diego de Guzmán, JuanVaquero, Sebastián Lemba, Diego de Ocampo, and Juan Criollo, in various parts of theisland’s geography.³Maroon settlements—manieles and

palenques

—spread throughoutthe colony for three centuries, thriving in such areas as Altagracia, Azua, Buenaventura,Cotuí, Neiba, Ocoa, Samaná, and San Juan de la Maguana.Nineteenth-century Dominican literary texts, taken as documents of what peopleof various classes were feeling and thinking, do not corroborate “the one-sided notion of Dominican culture, race, and anti-Haitianism [subsequently] advocated by the ruling

2. Silvio orres-Saillant, “Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar,” in

Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos,Blacks, and Afro-Latinos

eds. Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler (New York and Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2005), 295.3. José Juan Arrom and Manuel A. García Arévalo,

imarrón

(Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, Inc.,1986), 46.