Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature by Maja Horn (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2015 challenges us in the academy to rethink our own academic disciplines from the perspectives of those we “study,” as well as to seek to provide such others with something of uncontestable value through our academic endeavors. Paul Worley Department of English Western Carolina University MASCULINITY AFTER TRUJILLO: THE POLITICS OF GENDER IN DOMINICAN LITERATURE . By Maja Horn. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014, p. 202, $69.95. Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature examines the long-lasting effects of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity on Dominican politics and literature. Trujillo’s hypermasculine persona has generated considerable scholarly and literary attention. Horn, however, sheds new light on the topic by successfully linking Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity to the US occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) and to “other imperial forces” (2). Horn argues convincingly that “the US presence and intervention shaped Dominican national sentiments and gender formations in ways that facilitated not only Trujillo’s rise to power but also Dominicans’ embrace of his national-popular political rhetoric, including its hyperbolic language of masculinity” (24). Throughout the book, Horn engages readers in a thorough examination of Dominican politics and post-dictatorship literature to “address some of the discursive legacies of the Trujillato” (19). Horn’s study offers an engaging and well researched analysis that deepens our knowledge of contemporary gender attitudes in the Dominican Republic as well as of the linkages between discourses of masculinity, political power, and Dominican literary production. The book includes five chapters, an introduction, and a brief conclusion. The introduction and first chapter examine the ways in which Trujillo’s discursive legacies and the hegemonic notions of masculinity that were reconfigured, cemented and promoted during his regime successfully permeated Dominican culture and society. Horn argues convincingly that Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity should not be read as “simply a straightforward expression of ‘traditional’ patriarchy,” (15), but as a modern formation influenced by US imperialism, “international political discourses of sovereignty and Euro-American racism” (2). In these chapters, Horn displays an extensive knowledge of Dominican history, cultural practices, and gender discourses, and considers the ways in which these have had a significant impact on national politics. Throughout the book Horn establishes a dialogue with scholars from various disciplines, including Ernesto Laclau, Doris Sommer, Richard Turits, Christian Khron-Hansen, and 96 Book Reviews Silvio Torres-Saillant, among others. Horn argues that Laclau’s work on hegemony, in particular, provides a theoretical framework that allows for a deeper understanding of “how hegemonic formations may be challenged from below” (7). The gender lens through which Horn interprets social relations in the Dominican Republic and literature produced after Trujillo’s thirty-one year rule (1930-1961) complements existing scholarship on Trujillo, which has tended to focus on the “regime’s conception of national Dominican identity and the racial and anti-Haitian beliefs embedded in it” (49). The strength of the book lies in its critical engagement with postdictatorship Dominican literature. The book offers insightful readings of canonical and non-canonical literary texts that have received varying levels of critical attention and commercial success. Horn contends that the pervasiveness of the Trujillo dictatorship in Dominican letters makes Dominican literature an indispensable archive of that crucial time in Dominican history. This literary corpus shows the long-lasting implications of Trujillo’s problematic legacy, which many writers have challenged with varying degrees of success. In the fascinating chapter, “One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorship Political and Literary Canons,” Horn offers a critical overview of post-dictatorship literature, which successfully explains why so many Dominican letrados “have not, despite their best intentions, been able to successfully revise some of the Trujillato’s lasting discursive legacies in the post-Trujillo period” (51). The chapter culminates with an exemplary analysis of two dictatorship novels by renowned Dominican author, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. This chapter lays the groundwork for other provocative readings of novels and short stories by Hilma Contreras, Rita Indiana Hernández, and Junot Dı́az. Horn’s analysis of Contreras’s literary production makes a valuable contribution to Dominican literary studies with the inclusion of an indepth exploration of the dictatorship novel, La tierra...