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Dear Editor:

Earlier this week, I received from the Canadian publishers of my most recent academic book, From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba & The Dominican Republic (WLUP, 2012; reprinted in paperback in 2013), a copy of a review penned by J. Michael Dash that was published in RAL 45.1. I normally do not find any need to respond to reviews, good or bad, but upon reading a deliberately misleading statement, among others, in Dash’s review that attempts a wholesale reassignment of my ethnicity, I requested that the journal print a retraction in a future issue. The editors responded with a request that I engage in a “debate” with Dash, though it is nearly impossible to do so, since his review appears to be based solely on his evident distaste for feminist approaches to Caribbean studies. The dismissive tone and terms used throughout the review speak for themselves: “polemical,” “homily,” “dismayingly personal,” “about the evils of the phallocratic state.” They reveal Dash’s prejudices and that he has not bothered to read the text attentively nor in its entirety. What I seek to address here, then, is the lack of professionalism evident in the review.

Why Dash resorts to misleading diversions throughout the review, from insinuating that I am not actually Haitian to chronically lifting citations from the book out of their context and reframing them in ways that bear little to no resemblance to their origin, is mystifying. I can only conclude that Dash deliberately ignores my use of positionality, or standpoint theory, as a means to situate my reconstruction of Dominican and Haitian historical source material not conventionally placed in conversation in order to avoid engaging the scholarship of the text. Further, he shuns any intellectual grappling with the text’s feminist deployment of interdisciplinary tools gleaned from trauma/memory, geography, transnational, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories, among others, utilized to perform original analyses of works by Caribbean women. The excellence of this, and my previous work, has been recognized with a mid-career Guggenheim. Typifying a wide-ranging academic work as “more therapeutic than scholarly” in a histrionic diatribe is ironic. Dash’s inability to debate the usefulness of the theoretical apparatus, or the texts analyzed, is more suggestive of his unfamiliarity with them.

Having met Dash on a number of occasions, serving as keynotes and as plenary speakers at the same conferences, and on the same panels in recent years, and having found him generally congenial and professional, I am dismayed by his review’s vapidity. Paradoxically, he confirms the continued need for feminist interventions in the fields of Latin American/Caribbean studies.