We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom by Anne Eller (review)

Like the Haitian revolution that freed the other side of Hispaniola, anti-colonial fighters in Santo Domingo drew upon popular ideas of liberty and republicanism to sustain a struggle against Spain that culminated in 1822 in the planting of a palm "Tree of Liberty" to commemorate their bloody triumph. When the Spanish returned in 1861 to reassert their former colonial dominion, largely at the instigation of Cuban slaveholders who sought to expand their peculiar institution, the Dominican Republic disappeared only to be reclaimed a few years later after another exhausting and confusing partisan war. Anne Eller's telling of the story of the Dominican struggle for independence provides a useful counterpoint to other better known narratives of revolution and independence in the Americas, but two problems hobble the book—the writing and the author's uncritical engagement with historical and historiographical languages of race.

Reviews that take aim at a book's writing almost always come across as pedantic, churlish, or some worse mix of both. Nonetheless, in the case of We Dream Together the writing so interrupts the narrative flow and so distracts the reader's attention that at times it weakens one's faith in the author's interpretations and arguments. Various infelicities of style mar the manuscript: "Dominican emissaries deployed fraternal narratives of Spanishness tactically in recognition missives" (12); "Beleaguered elites bragged of extroversion and dreamed of foreign capital" (30); and "Dominican annexationists had been wildly omnivorous in their petitions" (67). Then there are sentences that simply do not make sense: "Santana faithfully related all the generals… in the different provinces" (100) and "Northern coast sea traffic can only be speculated" (198). And then there are other strange constructions. The author states, for example, that "foreign currency was the only hard specie" (30) when currency (paper bills and metal coins) is not specie (gold or silver); that "Spanish warships remained docked in striking distance" (180) when the ships were offshore and therefore could not have been docked; and that "the fighting spread like a whirlwind" (17) when whirlwinds do not spread. Such missteps and more make it difficult for readers to immerse themselves into the hermetic world of the text and of the interpretation.

Another problem that subverts the manuscript is the author's casual tracking between the ambiguities of the nineteenth-century Dominican language of race, as translated into English, and modern racial language that is more preoccupied with rigid notions of whiteness and blackness. "Spanishness," for example, emerges as an interesting political idea that impelled a certain segment of the revolution to separate themselves from their Haitian neighbours while also claiming a certain level of cultural accomplishment and maturity outside of usual racial proscriptions. Eller further indicates that "Dominicans of color sometimes used 'white' as a simple shorthand for 'foreigner"' (35). Against such historically specific and contingent concepts of skin colour and culture that do not comport with modern norms, however, Eller also often defaults to the modern vocabulary of race—black and white—in ways that efface the intricacies of the historical language of identity that sits at the core of the book and that overwhelm the particularities that make Dominican discourse so rich and interesting.

It is hard to pin down the importance of We Dream Together. Eller clearly tells a story that has not yet been told, but how that story fits within a larger interpretive or historiographical picture remains a bit unclear because the information often overwhelms the interpretation. Moreover, the slippage in her use of racial language and the many writing problems that beset the text point to a deeper and more basic problem, that of haste. In the end, the depth of the archival research and the exposition of a mostly unknown story contribute to the study of Caribbean history and of the Americas' revolutions but what to make of such a story...