The Imagined Island: History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola by Pedro L. San Miguel (review)

Book Reviews 181 The Imagined Island: History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola . By Pedro L. San Miguel. Translated by Jane Ramirez. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2005, p. 208, $22.50. The Imagined Island: History, Identio, and Utopia in Hispaniola (LaIsla Imaginada: Historia, Identical y Utopia en La EspaAola, 1997; c.2005) is an intellectual history of how the divided island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) has been socially constructed, envisioned, and represented from the 181hcentury to the present. In this pioneering study, historian Pedro L. San Miguel explores the various processes of political formation and national identity by investigating the complex history of Hispaniola. Both the Dominican Republic’s and Haiti’s histories became the unavoidable “something” for the other, even though this connection has not always been acknowledged within the corresponding traditions generated by the political conflicts and national pasts. In San Miguel’s The Imagined Island, one is given a sense of how a utopian ideology developed and intertwined among the intellectual writings from Hispaniola. He illustrates this complicated issue by focusing on a wide variety of historians, politicians, and writers who wrote on Hispaniola such as Antonio Sinchez Velarde, Pedro Francisco Bono, Jost Gabriel Garcia, Jean PriceMars , Manuel Arturo Peiia Batlle, Joaquin Balaguer, and Juan Bosch. As stated in the Introduction, the book aims to combine the historical political economy of the island with the analysis of ideologies . The book begins with a survey of the origins of nationalhistory as a catastrophic narrative in Santo Domingo. It is here where one learns how the elite sectors in the Dominican Republic view Haiti first as “the other” utopian slave society and eventually as a barbaric state and enemy to their nation. San Miguel explains this notion by tracing and illustrating the historical/political links between Velarde’sIdea del Valorde la Isla EspaEa (1785) during the 18” century and Peiia Batlle and Balaguer’s anti-Haitianismo and racists writing during the 20thcentury. In fact, these anti-Haitianismo and racist thoughts continue to be well symbolized and endured in today’s mainstream Dominican popular culture, where unfortunately they have negatively impacted the Afro-Dominican sectors of the country. The third chapter, “Racial Discourse and National Identity: Haiti in the Dominican Imaginary,” describes the complex historical ideas of national-racial identity in the Dominican Republic 182 The Latin Americanist Fall 2006 outside of the “barbaric” and “evil” Haitian. It is in this chapter where San Miguel explains the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and demographic origins of the identity problems of the island’s intellectual writers. He compares Velarde’s writings to the 19Ih-century solidarity thinker and liberal politician Bono. He concludes that Dominican-Haitian relations began to weaken since the 19th century due to the developing sugar economy in the Dominican Republic, caused by the Ten Years War in Cuba (1868-1878), and the unresolved border question between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He then continues by explaining how these causes structured and influenced the writings of the two leading supporters of the brutal Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina regime (19301961 ) in the Dominican Republic, Peiia Battle and Balaguer. He illustrates these factors with the savage 1937massacre of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians living along the border in the Dominican Republic and the continuouspublications of political histories either written by andor promoted by Balaguer and the Dominican everyday lifestyle. In the sixth chapter, San Miguel turns the tables to re-examine and critique Haitian intellectuals, specifically Jean PriceMars ’s study, La Republique d’Haiti et la Republique Dominicaine : Les Aspects Divers d’un Probleme d’tiistoire, De Geographie et d’Ethnologie (1953).According to the author, Price-Mars frames Haitian national identity on the basis of the country’s popular classes, notably the black-peasant culture. He contends that the point of departure between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is significant in the 171hand the 18‘hcenturies when both sides of the island were colonized and it became distinctly socioeconomically different. San Miguel understands that Price-Mars reads these historical racial-ethnic differences simply due to events such as the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the emergent military and economical factors implanted by the Unification period (1822-1844).Moreover, he...