Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

FAIN: FT-285725-22

Sophie Marinez
Research Foundation Of The City University Of New York (New York, NY 10007-1044)

Completion of a manuscript on the representation of violence in literature, political discourse, and cultural works produced in Haiti and the Dominican Republic between the 1790s and the 1990s.

This project examines representations of violence in literature, political discourse, and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic across three centuries. Focusing on material pertaining to various registers and disciplines, it draws on perspectives, aesthetics, and epistemologies from both sides of the island. In doing so, it responds to calls for deploying indigenous tools to interpret Afro-diasporic experiences, offering a homegrown, decolonial, island-centric framework through which to interpret reality across the entire island. As it examines various tropes, figures, and episodes tied to violence, it expands discussions on the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic beyond simplistic binaries, unraveling the complexity born of superimposed French, Spanish, British, and U.S- geopolitical interests, and emphasizing not optimism, as recent scholarship has done, but precisely the contentious as a productive, realistic site for change.

Associated Products

Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Book)
Title: Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Author: Sophie Marinez
Abstract: Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512826401/spirals-in-the-caribbean/
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9781512826401

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