Issues

This essay situates Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction novel _Midnight Robber_ within an understudied tradition of critical and creative thought that theorizes technological futurity in distinctly Caribbean terms. Although not typically read as “science fiction,” Édouard Glissant’s discussion of (ethno)technology and futurology as well as work by Aimé Césaire and Antonio Benítez-Rojo all address the dually oppressive and liberatory roles that emergent technologies—from the sugar mill to the World Wide Web—have played and might continue to play in past, present, and future Caribbean societies. Hopkinson utilizes more explicitly science-fictional tropes of extraplanetary colonization and cybernetics to explore how technologies carry the potential to serve both (neo)colonial and anticolonial ends: Midnight Robber demonstrates how colonial and anticolonial notions of “progress” similarly rely on a future-orientation, and the slippage between these two agendas unsettles reductive binaries between utopian and dystopian futures in the postcolonial Caribbean, as well as between totalizing views that characterize digital technology either as beneficent and democratizing or as part and parcel of Euro-American neo-imperialism. 

One of the appeals of imaginary a future alternative to the political present it the possibility of shedding modernity’s constitutive colonial assemblages and its conceit of the inevitability of human progress. Yet it remains something of a paradox that even at their most radical, such imaginaries are premised on that which is already intelligible, and draws on standing models of social organization and political association in putting forward its claims for an alternative future. This article examines such black Marxists thinkers as Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, and Amílcar Cabral, as representing a strain of black Marxist thought pursuing what I call the politically unimaginable—a mode of thought and orientation that pursues forms of political association for which they lack the historical models and even the theoretical language to fully conceptualize what they hope to bring into existence. 

This essay focuses on artwork that centers family photographs and home movies as a point of departure to trouble the conventional family album in order to narrate a story about Caribbean Chinese kinship. In the art examined, personal visual archives are used to respond to the lacuna of Caribbean Chinese familial intimacies from the colonial archive. Engaging shared themes of migration and racialized ideas of reproduction, three contemporary diasporic visual artists—Albert Chong, Richard Fung and Tomie Arai— mine oral history and family archives to blend aural and visual narratives. These artists rupture the surface of family images to trouble the bourgeois, heteronormative, and colorist scripts that often police the formation of family. Through different forms of remixing they engage with the affect and entanglements of family photography to form a visual vocabulary of diasporic kinship.  In doing so, the artwork—collages, documentary, installations— interrogates the afterlife of the nineteenth-century European colonial experiment of Chinese indenture, designed to  install a discreet “buffer race” between the white minority and the black majority in the Caribbean after abolition. The experiment, which depended on the capacity for the Chinese to develop bourgeois domesticity in the Caribbean, failed because of sexual intimacies between people of African descent and people of Asian descent, unsanctioned by the imperial order.  Another future of familial intimacies in the diaspora is present in their aesthetic of fragmentation and collage. 

This introduction traces critical concerns in Dominican gender and sexuality studies in the U.S. It suggests applying a triangulated lens to the study of gender and sexuality, focusing not only on Dominican-Haitian cross-border and colonial relations, but also on the role of U.S. influence--similar to how questions of race and Dominican-Haitian relations have recently been approached by scholars. The essay highlights then how the longstanding androcentric focus on the Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961) and the dictator's heterosexual exploits has given way to a recuperation of Dominican women as political actors and not merely passive bystanders or martyrs. It then sketches in the post-dictatorship period the emergence of new gender-focused organizations, NGOs, academic programs, and political quotas for women, but foregrounds how despite these advances, political and social gains have been uneven and the new constitution of 2010 is a significant setback, especially for women's reproductive rights. Alongside these developments, the essay describes the emergence and consolidation of a new generation of women writers in the Dominican Republic and the diaspora since the 1980s, and the growing visibility and presence of LGBT organizations and representations in the 21st century that raise important questions about how Dominican cultural norms interact with broader global strategies of "coming out" and identity politics.  

In the historiography of gender in the Dominican Republic, the stories of female martyrs loom large, substituting maternalist sacrifice for a more substantial treatment of women in the national narrative. This is particularly true for the twentieth century, where the female collaborators with the authoritarian regimes of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961) and Joaquín Balaguer (1966-1978) act as villainous foils for their saintly counterparts. This latent historiographical violence against women – in addition to the actual physical violence inflicted by the regimes – has created historical silences that work against reconciling with this difficult period in the Dominican past. This article deconstructs the mythification of female actors in the historiography and argues that the dominant narratives of “evil” and “saintly” women stilt understandings of the past, perpetuate a paternalist model of governance, and frame women’s political participation around rigid expectations of maternal behavior and sexual propriety.   

This article examines Raquel Cepeda’s memoire, Bird of Paradise. How I Became Latina through the intersections between Dominican latinidad, gender, race, and hip-hop. By exposing other discourses of latinidad as performed and imagined in New York City by an afro-dominicana, the memoir lays the foundation for future inquires related to AfroLatinx identities as portrayed in contemporary fiction and non-fiction narratives by Dominican women authors in the United States. This study prompts further questioning into how the interchange between island and diaspora discourses influence the growing field of AfroLatinx feminism. It highlights issues that are central to current and revisionist discussions of Latina and Dominican gender, ethno-racial, and cultural identity. 

Drawing on the strategies employed by LGBT activists in the Dominican Republic, this article seeks to theorize how strategic universalisms are mobilized as a form of agentive socio-political action. Delineating how universalization has historically been a tool of Catholic coloniality and empire, this article demonstrates the unique position of LGBT activists in the Global South. In the context of the Global South, and specifically a context that is heavily Catholic, the universalized language of LGBT enables Dominican activists to mobilize international, hemispheric, regional and national resources in the struggle for civil and human rights. They also, simultaneously, challenge who and what universalized concepts of the human and citizen can encompass.   

This essay analyzes the impact of Maria Montez as an eccentric Dominican actress in Hollywood and as an iconic figure in the cultural memory of the Dominican Republic. While Montez’ eccentric personality accorded her a place in the stereotypical landscape created for the “Latina spitfire” in English-language films, in the Dominican Republic her image as an international celebrity helped to further promote the national-popular homogenizing ideology of the Trujillo regime that upheld a distorted notion of democracy which negated racial and class differences (Horn 2014, 37). Accordingly, this essay is also concerned with examining the contradictory consumption of Montez as a Dominican/Caribbean celebrity within the media stardom of the late 1940s and early 1950s manufactured by the Hollywood industry. I draw on Teresa De Lauretis’ concept of the “eccentric figure” to ruminate on the contradictory paradigms that have conversely defined and negated the artistic craft of female performers such as Montez.  

Openly gay, white, wealthy business leader James “Wally” Brewster was appointed by the Obama administration to serve as a US ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 2013 in order to advocate for the rights of LGBT Dominicans. His presence remained controversial for the duration of his service, as he and his husband promoted an “out and proud” homonormativity that contradicts the more conventional “open secret” of LGBT lives in the Caribbean. This essay draws on ethnographic field notes, participatory research and an online archive regarding the climate for LGBT Dominicans, in order to question formulations of LGBT civil rights activism driven by NGO resources. The essay contends that under neoliberal development, Santo Domingo’s LGBT Pride festivities, such as the Caravana del Orgullo Gay, come to overshadow longstanding Dominican feminist coalitions and collective organizing against heteropatriarchy and hypermasculinity that in other ways seek to improve the lives of LGBT Dominicans. 

Focusing early twentieth-century images, I construct a method for discerning how ordinary, often anonymous, Dominicans fulfill, refuse, or frustrate the myriad desires contained in the imperial gaze as recorded in photography. This method, which I term “monte refusal” or “refusal from the hills,” provides a generative spatial, performative, and interpretative model. It unhinges the set of signifiers and expectations comprising gendered racial types that reveal two interrelated, (white) imperial anxieties. The first anxiety revolves around the gaze and performance of black subjects especially on an island in which they had emancipated themselves in 1804 on one side and 1822 on the other. The second is an unease around rural spaces that refute productivity, surplus agriculture, and, as such, the teleological movement towards “modernity” that is the sine qua non of hegemonic European temporality. 

A tribute to the pioneering scholar E. Antonio (Tony) Yaguarix De Moya, the essay celebrates his contributions to the study of sexuality and marginality in Dominican society by dwelling on key aspects of De Moya's scholarly output in this field in combination with the two scholars' memories of dialogue and mentorship by the recently departed elder. By highlighting "the anecdotal" as a central dimension to how De Moya's work sought to mobilize and disrupt the positivist scientific paradigms in which he was trained, Decena and Portorreal suggest that De Moya's work indexes the aim of this unforgettable presence to make space for social and sexual dissent and to practice a social science committed to decolonization. 

This essay engages a key thematic of Gaiutra Bahadur’s  Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture: racialized, gendered and sexualised violence in the making of the ‘coolie’ woman in British Guiana. Through literary non-fiction, Bahadur offers a rigorous and imaginative methodological approach that reveals and challenges the epistemic violence of the official archive. Her analysis incisively attends to the relationships between empire, intimacy and violence, without sacrificing either attention to the devastating effects for women, or the multiple ways in which Indian women refused to be defined only in terms set by violence. Finally, while Bahadur engages infrastructures of colonial violence that positioned the ‘coolie’ as not a slave, this essay offers a cautionary note about reproducing archival investments in irreconcilable difference. It extends Bahadur’s own approach to revisit some of the intimate encounters between Africans and Indians presented in the text to suggest other readings of ordinary proximities beyond violence. 

This commentary on Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman contextualises its themes and contribution through engagement with its creative non-fiction form. It places the text within the intellectual trajectory of Indo-Caribbean feminist historiography, highlighting how this literature has long drawn on matrilineal genealogies to examine indentureship, its afterlife and its significance for contemporary Caribbean feminisms. Critically seen, a focus on mutilated womanhood as individually experienced overshadows decades of Indo-Caribbean women’s empowerment through education, and their involvement in associational politics, theatre and publishing. Tracing narratives of Indo-Muslim womanhood also emphasizes significant religious and class differences in participation in public life, suggesting the limitations of Hindu-centered interpretative devices. Coolie Woman exemplifies post-indenture or ‘coolietude’ aesthetics, otherwise documented in art, performance and photography. Taking this up, the commentary’s letter form is a counter-archival, imaginative and inter-generational object which cites Bahadur’s techniques of memory work and her provocation to a Western world of publication and criticism. 

The author of Coolie Woman, a narrative history about indentured women, discusses researching and narrating the lives of subjects missing, at least in their own words, from the archives. She reflects on the possibilities of the personal and the present, along with alternative oral and visual sources, as strategies for navigating elisions and biases in the written records of the past. She also argues for the present as justification (for working with incomplete and biased archives). The essay draws parallels between African storytelling in the Americas and Indo-Caribbean storytelling and claims the twin tropes of the violence of archive and the fictions of the archive, already elaborated in the historiography of slavery, for the context of indenture.