We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, Dec. 2016). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dominican Independence and Anti-haitianismo Unity and Conflict
The source of Dominican anti-Haitian sentiments has been much debated throughout the years. Historically it has been attributed to the twenty-two period (1822-1844) when Haiti controlled the entire island, but recently there have been many who point to the issue of immigration as the root cause of these feelings. Here, by revisiting the period with a particular focus on key documents from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I argue that the period of unification under Haiti does not bear the blame of anti-haitianismo; instead a small group of conservatives initiated the ideology in the immediate post-independence period.
AHR, 2017
This article connects not only the history of overlapping emancipations across Caribbean empires but also rethinks how slavery might have been popularly remembered and discussed in Spanish colonial territories that were never predominantly plantation societies. The nineteenth-century history of Santo Domingo (from 1822-1844, part of Haiti, then the independent Dominican Republic for a time, then a colony of Spain once again, from 1861-1865) was very complex, and Dominican elites in these decades narrated their identity in contradistinction to Haiti. The overwhelming weight of these elite narratives on the territory’s nineteenth-century historical record – as a poor and overwhelmingly rural space, few written records survive – has hindered discussion of popular Dominican thought about the end of slavery, independence, identity, and renewed Spanish colonial occupation of the territory. The article considers an unprecedented event in Spanish colonial history, the re-annexation of Dominican territory in 1861. The Cuban Captain General at the time, Francisco Serrano, hoped the event would reinvigorate Spanish colonialism, forestall U.S. advancement in the Caribbean, and begin an experiment with free-labor empire. As the article argues, however, most Dominicans viewed the new occupation with tremendous trepidation. Their vocabulary of resistance centered on an understanding of the necessity to defend emancipation, even in a space where slavery had long since disappeared. Over the next several years, Dominicans and Haitians fought together to defeat the new occupation in the shadow of slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Not long after, independence fighting began in the neighboring islands as well.
Cuba, Haiti, and the Age of Atlantic Revolution
Reviews in American History, 2016
Long before Fidel Castro, Cuba was a special case in Latin America as far as revolutions were concerned. For all appearances, the late eighteenth-century age of Atlantic revolution bypassed the island. Cuba was the last Spanish American society to end slavery (1886), and it was similarly late to achieve independence. Just fifty miles to the east, however, the French colony of Saint-Domingue experienced what many scholars regard as the most radical of all the Atlantic Revolutions. In 1791, enslaved workers there rose against their masters. For a dozen years they stymied attempts to re-enslave them until, in 1804, their leaders established the independent state of Haiti. Yet this was a paradoxical moment. The end of Saint-Domingue's slave-produced sugar and coffee exports made it profitable for masters elsewhere in the hemispherenotably in Cuba-to buy more captive Africans and produce more of these products. Slavery's late heyday made Cuba, along with Brazil and the United States, central sites for what some scholars have dubbed the "second era of slavery." In the first era, from roughly 1500 to roughly 1800, Europeans enslaved Africans in the New World with no state opposition. In the second era, slavery and antislavery coexisted. By 1810, the British Navy was moving to eliminate the transatlantic slave trade, and, Ada Ferrer argues, Haitian leaders were working to end slavery abroad. The main point of Freedom's Mirror for Atlantic historians is that Cuba was, in metaphorical terms, the "hinge" between these two eras. Despite appearances, Ferrer maintains, the age of Atlantic revolution did not bypass Cuba; rather, Haitian opposition to slavery affected white, black, and brown Cubans in powerful ways that transcended higher sugar prices. Ferrer proves that Cuba came into its most profitable slave period despite a decade of exposure to the Haitian Revolution at every level of society. Along with her clear and beautiful prose, Ferrer's ability to situate Cuba in the age of Atlantic revolution makes Freedom's Mirror an important volume for
Archives of Revolution: Toward New Narratives of Haiti and the Revolution
Cul de Sac: : Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue. By PAUL CHENEY. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 274 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies. Edited by ELIZABETH MADDOCK DILLON and MICHAEL J. DREXLER. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 430 pages. Cloth, ebook. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. By JAMES ALEXANDER DUN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 350 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Edited by JULIA GAFFIELD. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 295 pages. Cloth, ebook. An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emanicipatin, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789–1809. By GRAHAM T. NESSLER. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook.
Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations
Latin American Perspectives, 2003
Michele Wucker's Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola powerfully conveys the message that Haiti and the Dominican Republic are, like two fighting cocks, locked in an all-out struggle for preeminence. "The cornered rat, the cock in a ring, the boisterous young man: all of them fight to defend territory," Wucker (1999: 238) writes, citing the ethologist Konrad Lorenz: "When a creature is attacked, its options are to fight back or flee.... On Hispaniola, geographic, economic, and political pressures have intensified urges to aggression and elaborate mechanisms for escape." Written in vivid, nonacademic prose, Why the Cocks Fight has rapidly become the first-and for many, I suspect, the only-book that people turn to for information about Haitian-Dominican relations. What concerns me is not just the book's popularity but the old ideas to which it gives new life. Wucker perpetuates two of the most questionable, if widely accepted, ideas about relations between the two countries. The first is that the citizens of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are consumed with animosity toward their island neighbors. The second is that the two nations are engaged in some sort of contest for control over the island of Hispaniola. These two assertions constitute the core of a "fatal-conflict model" of Dominican-Haitian relations that I aim to call into question in what follows. Samuel Martinez has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian migrants and returnees in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti and has published a book on this topic. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation-Social Science Research Council's Program on Global Security and Cooperation, he is now doing research comparing the modes of activism and knowledge production pursued by international human rights NGOs and Haitian-Dominican rights organizations.
Between 1930 and 1961, the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo took firm control of nation-building in the Dominican Republic. During this period he mobilized state historians, government departments, and the media to distance dominicanidad [Dominicanness] from Africa and orient it towards Europe. Trujillo's regime defined the national color as indio [Indian] and disseminated a racist discourse of antihaitianismo [anti-Haitianism] to posit the nation as civilized and modern in opposition to Haiti's poverty and primitivism. Santo Domingo, renamed Ciudad Trujillo, was the primary site for the objectification of national identity. Under Trujillo's authority, inner-city slums were cleared to make way for wide, Paris-style avenues and model suburbs. Trujillo built bridges to expand the city and monuments to concretize the importance of past heroic events to the nation (Derby 1998). Migration from rural areas to the city was restricted, and public spaces reserved for the light-skinned elite. This was Trujillo's modernity: a Dominican nation unified under a unique racial classification and with the promise of future progreso [progress].