Spirals in the Caribbean

Government-supported anti-Haitianism has taken on a new fever pitch in the Dominican Republic, emboldened by the current US political climate. At this moment, Sophie Maríñez’s Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic arrives with particular urgency and much-needed critical insight. Her study’s bold wager is that we must focus on and strive to understand heightened moments of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, including as “a productive, realistic site for change.” With this Maríñez notably opposes the tendency toward what she describes as “tropes of hybridity and fluidity favored by recent scholarship on Haitian-Dominican dynamics” (5). However, Maríñez’s focus on the contentious also does not align with the much-critiqued “fatal conflict” model, which portrays the two countries as perpetually locked in conflict.¹ Instead, Maríñez powerfully suggests a different conceptual lens; drawing on the Haitian spiralist literary movement, she argues that it can be usefully extended across the entire island to forge “a better understanding of the violence inflicted on the region and the resulting political possibilities” (8). 

Building on Kaiama L. Glover’s key study of Haitian spiralism, Maríñez suggests that spiralism’s theorization of a return with a difference—which reverberates with some of Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Derrida’s theorizations—can offer a “renewed island-wide framework” to help excavate a shared history of “struggles between slaveholders and freedom seekers” in the context of “super-imposed colonialist and imperialist agendas . . . that haunted all residents” (23, 56, 26–27). 

Maríñez is a rare scholar in our field who can skillfully put this island-wide framework into practice, given not only her fluency in the languages of both sides of the island but also her education and expertise in both francophone and hispanophone Caribbean literatures and cultures. This means that the reader of her book will find Haitian authors and texts rarely discussed alongside Dominican authors and texts in the already numerous studies on Dominican–Haitian relations (largely written from a Dominican studies perspective). In addition, the book draws from her personal experience as a participant in a key cultural moment in the Dominican Republic, which she defines as a “loosely articulated decolonizing movement” that allows her to recover the Afro-Indigenous relations it often foregrounded (2). 

Structurally Spirals in the Caribbean centers on what Maríñez defines as three foundational episodes of violence that “drive through and fasten history like . . . a spiral that repeats with a difference over time.” In chronological order these are, first, the decimation of the Indigenous people with the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in 1492; second, the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804; and third, the “genocide perpetrated in 1937 by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo” (2). In chapters that combine literary and historical analysis, Maríñez delves deeply into key figures and moments and shows how they evolve and repeat over time, reflecting changing political contexts. 

The first chapter foregrounds the Comegente (People Eater), a Black “abject cannibal figure” who emerged in the context of the Haitian Revolution on the Spanish side, along with the Deguello de Moca, the fabricated killing of hundreds by Haitian troops on the Spanish side, and the so-called Negro Incógnito (43, 57, 43). These fearsome figures and events are all, as Maríñez crucially argues, part of a “recurrent discursive practice of hiding slavery and the fights against it” and masking “the power struggles between slaveholders and freedom seekers” on the Spanish side of the island (57, 56). Maríñez boldly suggests that this masking is also at work in the thought of the Dominican intellectual Pedro Francisco Bonó (1828–1906), who is often extolled for his celebration of Dominican “mulattoes.” Maríñez challenges this celebratory view by pointing out how it was motivated by “profound anti-Blackness” (69). Bonó thereby aligns with a tendency to deflect “attention from island-wide fights for emancipation” and to mask it “with the paradigm of cultural differences”—between Dominican mulattoes and Haitian Blacks (79). This chapter is thus a tour de force of how Blackness and histories of Black Dominican freedom fighters were othered and masked through figures of the popular and intellectual imagination. 

The second chapter focuses on the 1937 genocide during the Trujillato but proceeds in similarly spiralist fashion across historical contexts, looking both to the past and the after-effects. This includes the earlier 1929 Dominican constitution and “the spiral of anti-Haitianism” that unfurled infamously “in the Ruling 169-13 issued by the Constitutional Court in 2013 to denationalize hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent” (89). While many scholars have grappled with this genocide and its contemporary ramifications, Maríñez puts this history into dialogue with Haitian fiction that rarely has been drawn from, including Anthony Lespés’s 1949 Les semences de la colere and Jacques Stephen Alexis’s 1955 Compère Général Soleil. Her analysis of these “spiralistic counterarguments of Haitian fiction” puts beautifully into practice what an island-wide framework can and should look like as much in historical as in literary studies (90). 

The second half of the book, the third and fourth chapters, makes a particularly crucial contribution to the existing scholarship on the island for teasing out connections between the Indigenous and African populations that constitute “a seldom acknowledged Afro-indigenismo” (139). Maríñez both calls attention to an “underappreciated indigenist vein in Haitian historiography and literature” (137–38) and to various creative groups and collectives in the Dominican Republic—Los Guatiaos from the 1980s and Isla de Tránsito—that were part of what she earlier called a “loosely articulated decolonizing movement.” This allows her to reconstruct a Dominican cultural history and moment that remains decisively understudied, with key figures such as the curator Amable López Meléndez, the curator and critic Alanna Lockward, the musician Irka Mateo, the dancer Marilí Gallardo, and visual and performance artists such as Geo Riopley, Silvano Lora, Johnny Bonnelly, Carlos Goico, and Mayobanex Vargas, as well as the anthropologist Soraya Aracena. They broadly shared an effort to “draw on the indigenous worldview and its interrelation with African communities, highlighting a prophetic rebellious spirit recurring against colonialism” (155). 

Such connections between Indigenous and African collective memories are further explored in the final chapter. There Maríñez powerfully argues for this connection by pointing out how Dominican Vodou, also known as “21 Divisions,” has a specific “Blue Division” that represents divine beings associated with “Taíno Indians of the Island and the water spirits” (183). Yet, Maríñez notes, “why Afro-descendant population would adopt the indigenous in their spiritual practices is a question few scholars have explored” (186). She teases out this connection further through a close engagement with the seminal Dominican singer and musician Luis Días, focusing on his work to “recuperate past traditions of forging open, egalitarian communities, always resisting establishment” (214). Here again Maríñez benefits from her deep personal knowledge of this cultural moment and repertoire that she was part of herself. Combining this with her scholarly acumen she is able to articulate not only the crucial ways that Afro-Indigenous connections were explored by these artists and intellectuals but also how they were part of a “decolonizing movement” in the Dominican Republic that scholars have yet to fully grapple with and that makes this study one of the most original and important works of scholarship in recent Caribbean studies scholarship, as recognized by the award of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. 

Maja Horn is a professor in Spanish and Latin American cultures at Barnard College, New York. She is the author of Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (University Press of Florida, 2014) and, more recently, Queer Genealogies in Dominican Literature and Culture (University of Florida Press, 2025). She is currently developing a new research project tentatively titled, “Beyond Independence and Inclusion: Disability Narratives in the Americas, a Critical South–North Dialogue.”

[1] See Samuel Martínez, “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations,” Latin American Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2003): 80–101.