| Popis: |
Transnational Hispaniola is a framework that re-evaluates Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s complex borderlands, at the crossroads of the Greater Antilles and at the heart of the emergence of modernity/coloniality in the Americas. This essay provides examples of how this transnational approach to Hispaniola rethinks Latinx Studies through close readings of an episode of Orange Is the New Black (2016) and Forget (2010), the debut album of Dominican American musician George Lewis, Jr., a.k.a. Twin Shadow. These competing visions of Dominicanness loosely correspond to prototypical responses to the Haitian Revolution and figure Haiti as the celebrated, vilified, or silenced other of Dominican blackness. They illustrate the necessity of including Haiti and its revolutionary history in Latinx Studies pedagogy to catalyze constructive discussions of ethnicity and race that cultivate inclusive representation, in syllabi, curricula, and scholarship, of Afro-Latinxs in general, and of Haitian Americans and Dominican Americans specifically. Teaching Haiti in Latinx Studies not only provides more historically nuanced and culturally specific understandings of racial formations across the islands of the Caribbean and their diasporas but also creates space for solidarity at a time when people of the African diaspora throughout the Americas are insisting, once again, that Black Lives Matter. |
