"Stinchcomb offers an intriguing and useful investigation of a politically charged topic in the annals of Dominican literary history and current cultural manifestations."--James J. Davis, Howard University
Dawn F. Stinchcomb identifies and examines the sensitive nature of racism in the literature of the Dominican Republic, a problematic aspect of the country's heritage from the contact period to the present. Despite the fact that 90 percent of the nation is of African descent, the national rhetoric employs racial labels to avoid admitting any ethnic similarity to their hated Haitian neighbors. In both politics and prose, the author says, blacks traditionally have buried their blackness, contributing to a crisis of racial identity in the Dominican culture.
Stinchcomb explores the issues of Dominicans' deep-rooted psychological and historical reactions to ethnicity and demonstrates how these attitudes have affected literary production. She shows that literature nationally regarded as "Negroid" is the creation of writers who claim to have no African roots and objectify the black characters they depict, and she demonstrates that the first "black" literature was written by blacks with roots in other Caribbean nations.
In contrast, Stinchcomb discusses the works of Blas Jimenez, an Afro-Dominican poet who proudly affirms his black identity, as proof of the existence of a literature that has remained in the margins of contemporary literature, because it criticizes the prescribed concept of Dominican national identity.
This book will be useful to scholars of Latin American and Caribbean literature and culture as well as to anthropologists and sociologists interested in ethnographic literature.
Dawn F. Stinchcomb is assistant professor of Spanish at Iowa State University.