Eluding Whiteness in Jeannette Miller’s Color de piel

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Notes

1 Miller’s poetry includes Fórmulas para combatir el miedo (1972; Formulas to Battle Fear), Fichas de identidad (1985; Identity Cards), and Polvo eres (2013; Dust You Are). Her prose fiction includes two collections of short stories, Cuentos de mujeres (2002; Women’s Stories) and A mí no me gustan los boleros (2009; I Don’t Like Boleros), and the novel, La vida es otra cosa (2013; Life Is Something Else). She has published hundreds of articles and books about Dominican visual art.

2 All translations are mine.

3 On the bacá, see McInerny 2019.

4 In a short blog post about her grandmother’s life, Miller does not mention a stay in Savannah, but does note that she spent time studying music in New York.

5 During the first U.S. occupation, many Dominican intellectuals who were profoundly concerned about national autonomy embraced a Latin or Hispanic identity that stood in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon identity incarnated by the United States. This Latin identity was multifaceted but included a racialized aspect linked to European whiteness. See chapter two of López 2011. As suggested by the analysis above, Miller does not directly engage these complexities in her novel.

6 Miller’s most recent book of poetry, Polvo eres (2013), provides a powerful example of the intensely religious nature of some of her recent writing.

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Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Russ

Elizabeth Russ is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her book The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (2009) examines the plantation as a trans-American literary trope. Her article “Telling Other Stories: Dominican Black Cosmopolitanism in Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s Tablero” is forthcoming in PMLA. She is currently working on a book that analyzes representations of nation, race, and gender by twentieth-century women writers of the Dominican Republic, including Cartagena Portalatín and Jeannette Miller.