At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance (review)
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Immigration has long played an important role in shaping the socioeconomics and politics of a nation. Likewise, its presence and impact can also be seen represented in literature. Publications dealing with notions of home and abroad as well as their influence [End Page 969] in the conceptualization of spaces within a given culture have steadily increased in recent years. The current book, At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, edited by La Vinia Delois Jennings, attempts to expose the roles played by whites and non-whites throughout history in perpetuating the supposed superiority of “whiteness”. The book is divided into two parts with five essays in each. Part I, “Literature”, examines representations of whiteness in connection with gender in literature, and how those representations reinforce criteria of whiteness in certain countries through time and space. Part II, “Performance,” looks at Spanish, Italian, and American contemporary cinema and analyzes how they create and transform the idea of whiteness not just in those nations, but also in individuals.
“Argentine White” by Amy Kaminsky presents the title and sets the tone for the Part I essays. “Argentine White” presents the claim of whiteness of Argentineans as deriving from the racial system that came from Europe with colonization and the caste system. The main point here is that Kaminsky argues for the invisibility of black Argentineans. Looking at sources such as colonization color line and the various governments’ politics of whitening, including Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s government, Kaminsky exposes how the claim of the whiteness of Argentineans has been asserted and how the existence of Black Argentineans has been cloaked in invisibility. She also uses sources such as Argentinean literature, including El gaucho Martin Fierro (1872), to demonstrate how the presence of blacks in Argentina as Argentineans has historically been refuted. In addition, she presents the most common explanation for the black presence in Argentina through comments such as their origin from other countries, like Brazil and Uruguay. Kaminsky argues this position, resisting the Argentinean claim to whiteness and to the superiority of this notion by exposing sources of Argentinean blackness including the Tango, and the case of María Eugenia Lamadrind, an Afro Argentine, that questions authorities with regards to Argentine whiteness today. The essay enables the reader to gain an insight on what has been called the “Europe of Latin America,” and makes visible the sources of the Argentineans’ false whiteness.
Dawn Duke’s “From “Yelida” to Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas: Gendering Resistance to Whiteness in the Dominican Republic” gives a critical account of why Dominicans deny their blackness. “Shaped by a Spanish colonial experience and a precarious political relationship with Haiti, the Dominican Republic’s cultural and aesthetic representations have become entrenched largely in issues of separations and distinctions based on race and border identity,” writes Duke (62–3). The author guides the reader to interpret her analysis, not just as a fixed socio-political and historical place, but one that can be changed through the connection of Tomás Hernández Franco’s poem, Yelida (1942). As the reading progresses, there is an encounter that explains how the immigration of real families from Haiti to the Dominican Republic shifts the whiteness ideology of Quisqueya. One aspect that would strengthen the present essay is a more in-depth analysis of how Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s regime impacted Tomás Hernádez Franco’s writing, since the poem was written when the dictator was in power. One of the most original aspects of the work concerns the Haitian female figure, revealing not just the Dominican denial of blackness, but the irony of including a figure for whom denial is within both a physical and mental space..
Others essays in Part I make reference not just to the role of female characters and their impact on the construction of whiteness, but also the importance of religion. Suzanne [End Page 970...
