Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

Small Axe, Volume 23, Number 2, July 2019 (No. 59), pp. 123-131 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731029

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BOOK DISCUSSION: Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican
Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present; New York: New York University Press, 2018; 324
pages; ISBN 978-1479867561 (paperback)

Ghosts of Dominican Past,

Ghosts of Dominican Present
Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

At the Caribbean Digital V Conference in Trinidad hosted by the Small Axe Project in Decem-
ber 2018, Alex Gil made a point that is crucial to the ghosting work pertaining to patriarchal
colonialism and nationalism exhumed in Dixa Ramírez’s book Colonial Phantoms: Belonging
and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present. Gil responded
to a moving presentation by Halcyon M. Lawrence on the imperialism of language recognition
software used by “Siri,” Apple’s iPhone robotic interface for shortcutting operations on the
computer-phone. Lawrence argued that Siri did not recognize a number of Caribbean dialects
and speech patterns and that using the device therefore required something akin to consent-
ing to empire with a form of linguistic assimilation.1 Gil asked, “Shouldn’t we be careful about
what we wish for, though?” And he continued, “Because when I don’t want to be spied on, I
speak in Dominican Spanish . . . and I’m hiding, I’m fugitive. . . . Some of us don’t want this
‘Alexa’ to know what we’re saying. It’s basically corporate and government tapping.”2 Even
as withholding recognition is certainly an exercise of imperial power, Gil’s intervention was
a reminder that extending recognition is not exactly an anti-imperial salve. For, as Ramírez
also offers throughout her book, recognition slips easily into a surveillance maneuver. What if

1 Halcyon M. Lawrence, “Siri mek me speak lik ah freshwater Yankee” (paper presented at the Caribbean Digital V Confer-
ence, Trinidad, December 2018).
2 Alex Gil, Q&A following session 10: “The ‘Big’ Questions,” Caribbean Digital V Conference, Trinidad, December 2018.

small axe 59 • July 2019 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-7703356 © Small Axe, Inc.

 124 [ Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann ] Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

misrecognition—or “ghosting,” to use the terminology Ramírez employs in dialogue with Anne
McClintock—facilitates resistance?
In an interdisciplinary archival reconstruction of a transmedial and transhistorical gene-
alogy of cultural productions, Ramírez illuminates how the Dominican Republic and trans-
national Dominican subjects become both visible and un-visible through multiple patterns
of “ghosting,” which pertain to “powerful ways in which colonial, imperial, and nationalist
entities wield their power.”3 In turn, she proposes that counteracting “the territory’s ghosting
within larger Western discourses, for better or worse” has been central to Dominican cultural
expressions (5). Her work on poetry, fiction, photography, theater, and film interrogates ghost-
ing mechanisms as they pertain to constructions of race and gender in addition to relations
of class and empire. She highlights the role of agency and the discordant coexistence of
both erasure and presence in her terminology of choice, for as she argues about “ghost-
ing,” it “compels us to ask who is responsible for creating the ghosts” and “implies that the
acts of erasure that are part and parcel of colonial, imperial, and many nationalist projects
have produced not so much actual silence as other unwieldy and recalcitrant presences”
(6). While Ramírez reads mechanisms of racialized and gendered ghosting and unghosting,
and as her analytical methodology itself necessarily yields a number of unghostings, her
work also reveals “the power of not being legible and not being recorded for posterity” (222;
italics in original).
Theorizing the relationship between power and visibility with respect to empire in the
Caribbean has a well-established trajectory. One of the most well known of such engage-
ments is Édouard Glissant’s call: “Nous réclamons le droit à l’opacité.”4 Glissant rhetorically
situates this entreaty as a response to an anecdote about an official French inspection of
poverty in Martinique. The inspectors conclude that poverty has “visibly” decreased on the
island, which raises a number of questions pertinent both to Glissant’s ensuing demand for
the right to opacité and Ramírez’s contribution to interrogating the ghosts, or opaque and
oft-overlooked presences, pertaining to imperial administrations of power in the Caribbean.
To name just a few arising questions: Poverty appears decreased to whom? What is the rela-
tionship between poverty and visibility? What forms may be taken by the poverty inaccessible
to the French official’s field of vision? A related moment occurs in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s
novella Chambacú: Corral de negros (Chambacú: Black Slum), when USAID representatives
visit the Afro-Colombian coastal community brought to life by the text. Upon the news of the
impending visit, the residents immediately take to painting houses and generally cleaning up
the area to make it more presentable. They are instructed to stop beautifying the community,

3 Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present
(New York: New York University Press, 2018), 5; hereafter cited in the text.
4 “We demand the right to opacity”; Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 14.
 SX59 [ 7.2019 ] 125

however, lest the representatives change their mind about granting them aid.5 Between Glis-
sant and Zapata Olivella emerge related insights to the domain of Colonial Phantoms: the
relationship to empire necessarily mediates the contours of visibility.
Even as she investigates a distinct Dominican “we” that deserves unique attention,
Ramírez engages an imbricated investigation of the terms and negotiations of imperial vis-
ibility. “Indeed, dominant Western discourses,” she tells us, “have ghosted Dominican history
and culture despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas not only as the first
Spanish colony of the hemisphere but also, alongside Haiti, as an exemplar of black self-
rule” (3). Here, she combines a number of historical sources that point to a significant his-
tory of black and nonwhite sovereignty in the territory that became the Dominican Republic.
Ramírez’s elaboration of these sources becomes the centerpiece of her book’s argument
and contributions.
The analysis Ramírez uses for examining the interstices of ghosted Dominican presences
is also methodologically intersectional. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s generative vocabulary on the
subject of the intersections between race and gender also converges on terrain that, like
Glissant’s concept of opacité, pertains to the analyses Ramírez theoretically builds through
the idea of ghosting. Crenshaw offers one definition for how we might conceive of intersec-
tionality that resonates strongly with the work of ghosting. She suggests that the focus on
race in antiracist work that centers racialized men and the focus on women in feminist work
that presumes the whiteness of women, “expound identity as woman or person of color as
an either/or proposition” and “relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists
telling.”6 Through my reading of Ramírez, I see the opening of the space between relegation
and resistance in Crenshaw’s poetic rendering. Crenshaw, like the French officials Glissant
refers to, is concerned with the law and public policy, but unlike them, she seeks to contribute
to making visible otherwise difficult to apprehend forms of violence enacted against women
of color in the US context. Even so, her rendering of intersectionality in this key moment is
instructively opaque. Not only is the location she refers to difficult to read, but we might, after
Ramírez, consider it ghosted, and we might therefore ask how much resistance—resistance to
telling—lives beyond the apprehensions of the law and policy makers. The danger of this line
of inquiry, one that Ramírez is careful to avert and that I also guard against, is to overestimate
the power of such resistance. I am convinced, to the contrary, that Crenshaw’s intersectional
terminology, Glissant’s demand for opacity, and Ramírez’s attention to ghosting and “stealth”
forms of resistance operate in relation to highly powerful (and lucrative) structures of alienation
that are violently enforced.

5 Manuel Zapata Olivella, Chambacú: Black Slum, trans. Jonathan Tittler (Ithaca, NY: Latin American Literary Review, 1989),
114.
6 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1242.
 126 [ Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann ] Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

Ghosts of Dominican Past

Central to the arguments Ramírez develops in Colonial Phantoms is the premise that the terri-
tory of the Dominican Republic has a history of being “relegated” to Haiti’s shadow, permitting
it to pass largely unnoticed as a “society with a majority free black population that lived beyond
the purview of any colonial oversight” (4). Without fetishizing this particular kind of ghosting or
Dominican responses to it in cultural and political negotiations for accessing visibility, Ramírez
reminds us that “cultural expressions of refusal are not necessarily emancipatory” (4–5).
Indeed, as she continues, they are “often deeply ambivalent” (5). Even so, time and again, her
book illuminates the centrality to Dominican cultural productions of a centuries-long history of
its predominantly free and majority black and mixed-race society, beyond marronage, living
largely beyond colonial surveillance and outside the framework of plantation slavery.
The claim should not be taken too far, however, for of course chattel slavery existed in
the Dominican Republic. The intervention is more subtly disposed. Ramírez suggests, for
example, that “the history of the Dominican Republic for centuries contained whispers of
a way of being in the Americas that to some extent evaded dominant socioeconomic and
political structures” (9). The idea of “whispers” is key to what Ramírez seeks to approximate
in her readings, whispers that demand turning the volume down significantly on hegemonic
narratives of Dominicanness based on a set of elite practices, which themselves have often
been subject to gross oversimplification.
In addition to adding “whispers” to the motif of ghosting for analytically positioning
the uniqueness of Dominican racial and gendered history, Ramírez offers the distinction
between the Plantation as capitalized, following Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s work on the central-
ity of plantation-based economies to the Caribbean, and plantations as uncapitalized, to
refer to how much less central plantations were to the longue durée of Dominican history
(14–15). As she explains, “A society with a majority black and mixed-race rural population
that was not centered on a Plantation system while reliant on one of the strongest Plantation
societies the world ever saw—Saint Domingue—rendered it unique among other slave-
holding societies in the Americas” (14). Sibylle Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the
Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, which Ramírez engages to build her case, also
notes that before 1822, the economy of the Dominican territory “did not depend on large-
scale plantations” and that at this time, a “vast majority of Dominicans were free people of
color.”7 It is not the newness of the information but its positioning and conceptualization
that affords the value of Ramírez’s work around the historical facts of prevailing freedom for
black and mixed-race people in the Dominican Republic. The power of the intervention may
be traced in its relationship to two crucial components of Dominican history that “haunt” its
present transnational realities: the pejorative rendering at large of Dominican racial ideology

7 Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), 145.
 SX59 [ 7.2019 ] 127

and the force of hegemonic, politically potent, and dangerous anti-Haitian ideology in the
Dominican Republic. Ramírez works to denaturalize both, but it appears from her rendering
that they are deeply entangled.
Her centering of a long-ghosted tradition of Dominican black freedom points to a neces-
sary rupture—one that is long overdue and that a number of interventions in Dominican stud-
ies have also contributed to—with commonplace derisions of Dominican racial ideology on
the basis of its discord with US constructions of blackness. As if the entire hemisphere and
beyond were not “sick with colonialism” and its attendant antiblackness, nonwhite Domini-
cans become fantasized as somehow oblivious to—or denying—their African racial heritage.8
The oversimplification of presumed racial denial among Dominicans implies two erroneous
suppositions: that the antiblack policies and discourses produced by Dominican elites could
represent the entire territory’s populace and that US racial ideologies, even in presumably
antiracist discourse, may be decontextualized and overvalued in relation to racial ideologies
that emerged out of the various empires that colonized the Americas. Ramírez asks to begin
with another premise altogether when assessing Dominican racial formations: “What Haiti
came to represent in the Western imaginary overshadowed the other examples of free black
subjectivity as they predominated for centuries on the eastern side of the island” (3). The over-
determination of Haiti’s revolution, which has itself been grossly oversimplified, is necessarily
entangled in the possibility of both seeing and not seeing Dominican forms of black freedom.
Importantly, however, US empire as a consequential spectator is also imbricated in Ramírez’s
readings of how Dominicans have negotiated their racial presentations.
Lorgia García-Peña’s recent book Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives
of Contradiction also extends our understandings of the Dominican Republic as bordered
by both Haiti and the United States, a framework for understanding the interstices of the
Dominican-Haitian relationship alongside the US-Dominican relationship. García-Peña’s book,
like Ramírez’s, offers nineteenth-century perspectives from the United States in order to
signal the predominance of black freedom in the Dominican Republic. García-Peña reminds
us that a number of African Americans migrated to territories now located in both Haiti and
the Dominican Republic during the nineteenth century and that Frederick Douglass had been
among those who advocated for African American migration to the territory of the Dominican
Republic in particular.9 As García-Peña notes, Douglass admired the Dominican Republic
as “a place where the man can simply be man regardless of his skin color.”10 It is indeed an
intellectual challenge to hold the possibility of centuries-long pervading freedom for black
and mixed-race Dominicans together with antiblack productions of the official Dominican

8 I refer to Aimé Césaire’s argument about colonialism as Europe’s illness in Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham
(New York: Monthly Review, 2001).
9 Lorgia García-Peña, Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016), 8–9.
10 Ibid., 9; García-Peña quotes Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892; repr., New York: Collier,
1962), 398.
 128 [ Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann ] Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

archive that both Ramírez’s and García-Peña’s books exhume. Accepting the challenge and
acknowledging the Dominican Republic’s own right to opacity, however, appears indelible to
understanding the history of Dominican cultural productions.
Ramírez plunges directly into this difficulty in her two chapters on the trajectory of Salomé
Ureña, who became a leading poet of the Dominican Republic in the late nineteenth century
while she mothered two of the country’s leading male intellectuals, Max and Pedro Henriquez
Ureña. How does a woman of African descent become a leading poet in an effectively male-
dominated intellectual field? How does her blackness come under erasure in images that
memorialize her? Ramírez takes readers into Ureña’s letters to her exiled husband and into
the archival record of her photographs in order to parse how Ureña’s romantic poems and her
blackness were both ghosted into the record of her production as a leading poet and symbol
of the nation. If women of color in the Americas, as Crenshaw contends for the US context,
are regularly relegated to a location “that resists telling,” what Ramírez demonstrates about
Ureña is that her visibility at the center of Dominican letters has been produced by resisting
the telling of her blackness at the same time as it foreclosed the value of her most romantic
(and erotic) poetic productions.
In a move that connects past and present phantoms, Ramírez offers an intriguing exami-
nation of the use of indio to refer to mixed-race Dominicans. In her reading, she situates “the
term ‘indio’ as a ghosting mechanism” (158). As she describes the ambivalent negotiation
implied in the self-identification as indio:
To say one is indio instead of negro or even mulatto is an utterance more complicated than mere
black denial. . . . To describe oneself as indio in the Dominican Republic is an acquiescence—
often necessary, especially for those in the most precarious socioeconomic positions—to
an official nationalist narrative of origin. But it also contains whispers of those centuries of
“forgotten substitutions,” most notably the “substitution” of taino labor with African labor in
the sixteenth century and, starting in the late nineteenth century, the discursive substitution of
nonwhite insurgency and black self-autonomy with the idea of Dominican whiteness in relation
to Haiti. (158; italics in original)11

The work Ramírez does here is subtle and ambivalent, adding depth to the ghosts embed-
ded in Dominican racial ideology. The tension with Haiti reappears, suggesting that the
racial identifier indio holds a history of racialized substitutions, including that of a screen
of relative Dominican whiteness, reminding us that even when Dominican ideologies pro-
duce a divide between Dominicans and Haitians, their inextricable relation persists, as a
whisper, a ghost.

11 Ramírez quotes Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 5.
 SX59 [ 7.2019 ] 129

Ghosts of Dominican Present

Ghosting works in a distinct way in Ramírez’s final chapter, illuminating the discontinuous way
colonial tropes enmesh Dominican women in the present. A divide emerges between a present
pervaded by “the Dominican Republic’s embroilment with dominant global economic capitalist
networks” and their “concomitant imaginaries” at odds with a past pertaining to a “unique
colony with a majority black and mixed-race free population and then a non-slave-holding,
black-led nation-state” (182). Although Ramírez is careful not to totalize either view, her work
in this chapter challenges dominant paradigms of historically coordinating the violence of
empire and slavery with present structures of racial capitalism and neocolonial imaginaries.
The tension between, on the one hand, a territory that was largely overlooked by the
Spanish empire for centuries and, on the other, present neocolonial patterns that flatten rep-
resentations of Dominican women into a racist colonial imaginary requires greater attention for
revising the presumed connectivity of past and present. “Whatever singularity predominated
in the Dominican Republic for centuries,” Ramírez explains, “has generally ceased to exist,
only remaining in some of the residues and ghosts I explored in previous chapters” (158). It is
striking that Aníbal Quijano’s work on the “coloniality of power” does not enter the book until
this final chapter, seeming by extension to be most relevant to the contemporary moment the
chapter examines (from the late twentieth century to the present) (189).12 Counter to Quijano’s
framework, the country seems to have stealthily evaded many of the tropes of empire, slip-
ping so often under its radar—like the errant St. Dominick ship in Herman Melville’s Benito
Cereno that Ramírez uses to open her book. It would not be until very recently, then, that what
in Quijano is proposed as a framework for the continuity of racialized and gendered colonial
paradigms of power, would resonate strongly in the Dominican Republic.
Perhaps the return of colonial apparitions and the force they take in the present pertains
more to recent shifts in global power dynamics than they do to a more continuous imaginary
in cases beyond the Dominican Republic. I think, for example, of the proliferation of sculp-
tures and images that portray disfigured and dehumanized apparitions of blackness on sale
for tourists in Cuba in recent years. As US Americans relish in their still newly potentiated
desires to “see” Cuba, it appears from the multiplying visibility of such objects that they find
an eager market. But what is most visible in Cuba is the proliferation of such objects, and
therefore what is on display is the choice to sell them, not the market and the contemporary
racist imaginaries that make it profitable to sell such objects to travelers from the United States
and around the world.
Ramírez’s work on cultural productions engaging Dominican sex tourism examines similar
relations of visibility. In her readings of recent fictional and nonfictional writings on sex tour-
ism in the Dominican Republic, she draws attention precisely to how sex tourists make sex

12 Ramírez references Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000):
533–80.
 130 [ Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann ] Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

workers hyper visible while they withhold representations of themselves. As for Peter Schafer’s
photo-journal project “Diary of a Sex Tourist,” Ramírez effectively crumbles its “good inten-
tions”: “Unlike the bodies of the women he photographs, Schafer’s body is nowhere to be
seen. Instead, as readers and viewers of his interviews, essays, and photographs, we become
privy to his intellectual approach to the topic” (192). Schafer’s body is of course implicated in
the entire project of his book, and the book itself is predicated on his paying for sexual and
affective labor and time and even on a purported authenticity that his book will later go on
to sell, but his body does not appear alongside those of his subjects. In another case of the
pervading opacity of the sex tourist, Ramírez draws on a section of the short story “Novia del
Atlántico” (“Girlfriend of the Atlantic”) by Aurora Arias. In the story, the male narrator refers
to an internet site with recommendations for “the best places in the world to find cheap sex
labor.” He describes a photograph he posted to the site of himself in a sex act with a young
Dominican girl, and as Arias’s narrator indicates, the viewer may “look for her”: “She’s easy to
find on the web, look at her face, hers; not mine, which I erased to prevent being recognized,
in case the girl is a minor” (204).13 Ramírez draws out how Arias “estranges the reader both
from a taken-for-granted ideology of globalization and from the brothel space as normal-
ized in Latin American literature” (203). Her reading also highlights “the difference of power
between the Dominican sex worker . . . and a man who is able to blur his own face and who
can choose his level of participation with ease” (204). In both these haunting cases, the ghost
seems to be the sex tourist. Their exercises of power, both fictionally and nonfictionally, seem
predicated on their ability to hide while they subject sex workers to being seen through an
already available (newly resurrected?) colonial regime of representation that would naturalize
the “availability” of their sexuality.

Stealth Politics
In my research on the history of US empire in the Caribbean, I came across an unforgettable
story about how the United States tried and failed to establish a military base at Samaná
Bay, in the Dominican Republic. This story resonates strongly, in my view, with Ramírez’s
framework for thinking through the opaque and ambivalent forms of resistance in Dominican
history and cultural productions. The story is about how, during the 1890s, Dominicans kept
the Bay of Samaná from the infamous fate befallen by Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The Domini-
can leadership did not overtly refuse the base, and they suffered a significant financial loss of
sovereignty in the process, but they kept the United States from building that base. As Cyrus
Veeser reports, by 1890 the US government had attempted to lease Samaná twice, but their
plans repeatedly failed. Then in 1890 they also tried to lease Haiti’s Môle St. Nicolas, but that

13 Ramírez quotes Aurora Arias, “Novia del Atlántico,” in Emoticons (San Juan: Terranova, 2017), 117–18 (Ramírez’s
translation).
 SX59 [ 7.2019 ] 131

plan also failed, “thwarted in part by Frederick Douglass,” who was then US minister to Haiti.14
The US plan in 1891 was shrewd: the lease of Samaná was included in an 1891 “reciprocal”
trade agreement that would facilitate greater trade between the Dominican Republic and the
United States. Ulises Heureaux, the president of the Dominican Republic at this time, negoti-
ated directly with the US ambassador, and since Heureaux knew that relinquishing the bay to
the United States would foment an internal rebellion, he asked for immediate payment, surely
anticipating what he was told in response, that “the money had not yet been appropriated”
by the US Congress. The pressure only increased in 1892 when the US-based San Domingo
Improvement Company (SDIC) took over the Dominican foreign debt, which Veeser argues
was “one event in a larger US plan to reorient the Caribbean economically and politically.”15
The reorientation in question was geared toward establishing US dominance over the hemi-
sphere, a direction for which the Caribbean area was considered highly strategic. Heureaux
faced widespread unrest among Dominicans as a result of the SDIC debt takeover, so in order
to avoid fomenting a revolt, he continued to delay ratifying the treaty with the United States
for the next two years.16 As Veeser explains about the US failure to occupy the Dominican
Republic with a base at this time, “American ambitions had converged too quickly upon the
Dominican Republic, with little regard for the Dominican people as actors in their own right.”17
The popular disapproval of US imperial moves among Dominicans was too widespread to
tolerate both a debt takeover and a military base. Fueled by organized popular opposition,
however, Heureaux exercised a stealthy form of resistance to US pressure, one that would be
easy to ghost, given that Heureaux is by no means a national or anticolonial hero. Make no
mistake about the ambivalence here: Heureaux quelled protests violently and would go on
to seek the same lease after 1898, when the US occupations of both Puerto Rico and Cuba
meant they had lost interest in this base. His actions demonstrated, however, that the will of
a people willing and organized to revolt combined with a political strategy of deferral can at
least partially quell the imposition of a burgeoning empire’s will.

14 Cyrus Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America’s Rise to Global Power (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 35.
15 Ibid., 35, 30.
16 See ibid., 37–39.
17 Ibid., 39.