By the turn of the century, scholarship on Dominican literature was starting to become less of a rarity in North American academic circuits. There were fierce efforts coming from the pioneers of Dominican studies before that time, namely Silvio Torres-Saillant and Daisy Cocco de Filippis. And one cannot forget the tenacious work of Rei Berroa, who edited a dossier on Twentieth-Century Dominican Literature for the Revista Iberoamericana (Pittsburgh) in 1988; Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Consuelo López-Springfield as guest editors of the special issue of Callaloo on Dominican Literature and Culture published in 2000; and Ramona Hernández and Anthony Stevens-Acevedo’s monograph issue of Camino Real, a journal of the Franklin Institute (University of Alcalá, Spain), in 2011. These important anthological projects showcased the vibrant literary production from the Dominican Republic, which had been inexplicably overshadowed by the prevalence of scholarship on Cuban and Puerto Rican literatures. Certainly, if we consider the context of the North American academy before and in the first years of the new millennium, an examination of the curricula of the departments of Hispanic Studies in the major universities of the United States and Canada in that period would reveal a minuscule percentage devoted to the study of Dominican literary production. Likewise, a quick glance at the main academic publications in the field of Latin American literature up to that point uncovers a very limited number of articles dedicated to Dominican texts. A striking example of what I am describing is Bladimir Ruiz’s special issue of the Revista Iberoamericana on Representations of the Nation in the Hispanic Insular Caribbean. Ruiz’s selection features a dozen articles, seven of which are devoted to Cuban literature, while only one examines texts from the Dominican Republic.
Undoubtedly, there is still a lot of work to be done to bring Dominican cultural production out of its relative critical invisibility, but despite the discouraging panorama, positive signs have been observed in the last two decades. Clear proof of this is the crucial production of Dominican artists, most of whom are under fifty years of age, and who, together with the work of a handful of emblematic figures, such as Marcio Veloz Maggiolo and Junot Díaz, have both transformed Dominican literature and the arts and awakened the interest of specialized critics. Certainly, the work production of authors such as Rita Indiana, Homero Pumarol, Juan Dicent, and Pedro Antonio Valdez, as well as that of the writers included in this dossier—Josefina Báez, José Mármol, Aurora Arias, Frank Báez, Rey Andújar, Alejandro González Luna, Sorayda Peguero, Yaissa Jiménez, José Arias, Zaida Corniel, and Edgar Smith—are largely responsible for the renewed attention in Dominican literature among scholars and readers in North America and globally.
It could be argued that the literature that has emerged in the third millennium from the work of these and other authors significantly expands the traditional coordinates of thinking Dominican culture, particularly by drawing its margins beyond folklore and into the open and expansive realm of transnational connections. One of the core effects of such dynamics is the understanding of Dominicanness as a protean cultural process and consciousness, one that expands in unpredictable forms and configurations like those of the Antillean mangroves. Twenty-first-century Dominican literature, and the arts in general, as the majestic work of Jorge Pineda makes superbly evident with the illustrations in this issue of Review, also address the rapid and complex development of Dominican capitalism and its dire repercussions in society at large. The consolidation of the capitalist order in the Dominican Republic was anchored in the aftermath of two American invasions (1916, 1965) and the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961). Dominican cultural production of the new millennium from the island and the diaspora exhibits a critical view of the much-celebrated modernity and economic success of the Dominican Republic. Among its recurrent features are an ironic approach to national historical processes and giving centrality to the practices of everyday life. Most of Dominican literature today is concerned with documenting social relations and new forms of the thriving society that serves as its framework, but also charting the itineraries of affect and the ambivalent nuances of a modernization characterized by both a sustained stable economic growth and the worsening of social inequality.
In a talk from 2019Footnote1, Dominican literary critic and fiction writer José Alcántara Almánzar posited that twenty-first-century Dominican literature could be linked to what he identifies as the “culture of protest” in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. His interpretation needs to be qualified, since these are very different literary manifestations of crisis. The “culture of protest” that Alcántara Almánzar sees in the literature of that period is anchored in the context of a very specific juncture, which has to do with the adaptation to a new paradigm of society after three decades of Trujillo’s dictatorship, the coup d’état against Juan Bosch in 1963, the 1965 war, and the second U.S. invasion that same year. In other words, it is a literature that points to the upheavals of a major restructuring process in all areas. A very different matter is that of the crisis presented in Dominican literature of the third millennium, more oriented to relativize the burden of history that preoccupied writers during the second half of the twentieth century. The literary production of the third millennium speaks of the multiple, relational, mangrove-like textures of what is called “Dominican culture,” a space that includes an unavoidable and intense exchange with diverse traditions and cultural modes of being, particularly through tourism and immigration. This literature exercises a frontal attack on traditional ways of interpreting Dominican cultural mores by questioning the mythology that has contributed to legitimizing a sugar-coated vision of the country’s contemporary history. The work of the writers featured here stands out in that regard, and a new generation of critics is paying serious attention to it. In today’s Dominican literature, these critics have found a fertile ground on which to test many of the theoretical tenets of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, border studies, gender studies, and queer studies, to name a few. The growing number of critics who are currently delving into Dominican literature include Sharina Maillo-Pozo, Emily A. Maguire, Danny Méndez, and Elizabeth Russ, whose research is featured in this dossier.
Sharina Maillo-Pozo’s reading of Dominicanish (2000) focuses on the topic of borderlands as it relates to the portrayal of personal stories at the intersections of Latinidad and Dominicanidad in this groundbreaking work by Josefina Báez. In his essay on Johan Mijail’s Chapeo (2021), Danny Méndez examines the transience of queer black bodies in a deeply heteropatriarchal and white-centric Dominican society. Emily A. Maguire digs into Rita Indiana’s paradoxical play with speculation in her last two novels, La mucama de Omicunlé (2015; Tentacle, 2018) and Hecho en Saturno (2018; Made in Saturn, 2020), while Elizabeth Russ’s analysis of Color de piel (2019; Skin Color) sheds light on how Jeannette Miller’s fictionalized autobiographical novel engages in a critical examination of the Dominican cultural establishment’s fervent commitment to defend whiteness as norm in a twentieth century dominated by American interventionism.
The Dominican literary space of the twenty-first century is broad and diverse, an unmistakable sign that it is anchored in a solid tradition shaped by the craft of several generations of writers from inside and outside the island. The creative works included in this dossier are a testament of that. Frank Báez and Sorayda Peguero explore masterfully the interrelation between journalism and fiction in their “crónicas” (chronicles) to claim for this porous genre a certain political dimension based on its emancipatory character. In the fiction by Aurora Arias, Ángela Hernández, Rey Andújar, Miguel Yarull, Yaissa Jiménez, Zaida Corniel, and José Arias, the reader witnesses a Santo Domingo that does not fit in the culture of pomp and pageantry that adorns Dominican daily newspapers. The remarkable poetic pieces by Josefina Báez highlight subjects recognized in their capacity for self-formation to draw the contours of an alternative pedagogy of Dominican culture. Finally, the precise and refined poetry by José Mármol, Edgar Smith, and Alejandro González Luna bear witness to the vitality of a genre that has provided the Dominican Republic with its most salient literary monuments.
I thank Daniel Shapiro for the opportunity to curate this special issue, and to the academics and writers who agreed to participate in it. These final lines are dedicated to Dominican master painter and sculptor Jorge Pineda, whose amazing artwork illustrates this special issue and who sadly passed away on February 16, 2023, when the project was in its final stages.
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Notes on contributors
Néstor E. Rodríguez
Néstor E. Rodríguez (1971) is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Crítica para tiempos de poco fervor (2009; Criticism for Times of Little Enthusiasm), Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature (2010) and Interposiciones (2019; Interpositions), among other publications.
Notes
1 “Panorámica de la literatura dominicana,” Casa de América, Madrid, 5 June 2019. https://www.casamerica.es/literatura/panoramica-de-la-literatura-dominicana